sunslammers

1.82

The Son of Rome

After three days and four nights spent wandering the boundless lands of Thrace, we found our first true city. More than just a collection of brutal nomads and whatever burdens they could carry - like a haggard Roman legion with no clear chain of command - or a system of mountain passes and caves overflowing with hulking redheads, this was a permanent settlement. One built to last.

Unsurprisingly, it was a Macedonian addition.

Even less surprising than that, it was a desecrated shell of what Alexander had first ordered built.

Honest fortifications, walls and ramparts of sun baked brick, were betrayed by a lack of Macedonian souls to man them. What remained of the city's southern gate hung agape, broken and kept open indefinitely by stakes in the earth and rubble stacked against it as stoppage weight. We rode side-by-side, three mounted horses passing through with room to spare in between.

“This is Ionic architecture,” Selene murmured as we progressed. Her burning scarlet eyes roved over the works that remained, fascinated.

There were decorative arches, grand columns topped by stone ornaments like unfurled scrolls that the Ionic aesthetic labeled volutes, and triangular pediments atop those voluted columns in most of the public constructions. Some of those pediments still retained a portion of their painted and carved reliefs, hinting at past purpose, but Kronos had long since drawn his thumb across their finer details.

I caught glimpses of what this place had been before, here and there in portraits of urban decay. There, frozen pools of tainted still water in massive stone basins, the city’s once proud baths. Here, an inner courtyard garden revealed through the gaping wound of a residential estate’s collapsed outer walls - a pristine peristylium, in its day, constructed in the same style as the one containing the Aetos family’s filial pools. But the garden in this abandoned home had long since spilled over its cultivated boundaries. Gnarled, frost-covered vines strangled every column and rail that lined the courtyard.

The more suggestions I saw of the once proud polis, long since dead, the worse my throat ached and the worse the chambers of my nose burned. The lash too far was the facade of a statue in the center of the broken city, a wide-open pavilion that might have once served the same purpose as a forum or an agora. As soon as I spotted it in the distance, I nearly choked on soot.

“Here,” Selene said quietly, removing one arm from around my waist just long enough to pull the canteen out from a fold in her silks. Two shells of polished iron joined in the middle by copper bands. I drank deeply from it, ignoring the flavor. I had seen her fill it with clean, crisp river water just a few hours ago.

Yet somehow, it tasted like the Adriatic.

“There aren’t any Greek colonies this far from the Aegean,” Griffon said, picking the ruins apart with his eyes and his wandering pankration hands. He sifted idly through rubble as he rode, illuminating remnant signs of what had once been. “Junior.”

“Yes, senior?” Selene replied. They had decided to stick with that dynamic, apparently.

“Do you know where we are?”

“No clue at all.”

The former Young Aristocrat hummed and continued with his search. We rode, a slow and wary plodding toward that central pavilion.

“You aren’t going to ask me?” Scythas seemed to regret the words even as he spoke them.

“Of course not.”

The Hero scowled. But he didn’t look our way. Since their last conversation, he had kept his horse either in front of ours or on the other side of mine, avoiding even a glimpse of the scarlet son. For once, Griffon had ignored the opportunity to prod an open wound and let him be.

“Do you recognize this place, Scythas?” Selene asked, for his sake as much as ours. The daughter of the Oracle had been subdued as well since that baring of hearts, more the version of herself she had been when Scythas first came to us in Bakkhos’ courtyard. Tempered and grave.

“In a way,” he answered, nodding. “This is one of the places where Bakkhos used to live. Before he came to Greece.”

“How can you tell?”

“The hand,” Griffon answered in his place. “The hand is still pointing him the way.”

Scythas blinked, and for the first time in several hours looked past me towards Griffon.

“How did you-?”

“Just a feeling.”

Scythas looked at him strangely.

“We’ve been together this whole time,” Selene pointed out. “There hasn’t been an opportunity for you to summon it again, not without us seeing.”

After a beat, hazel eyes and golden coals flickered and turned to us. “I don’t have to summon again what was never fully dismissed. It’s taking a different form than what you saw in that vineyard, but it’s still here. And it has been the entire time.”

“The wind,” Griffon guessed. “A whisper so faint, none but the Hero of the Scything Squall could possibly hear it.”

Scythas’ jaw flexed.

“The kyrios told me once,” he ground out, ignoring the statement with some effort, “that in his day, he had seen wonders the likes of which the world no longer offers. Not because it will not, but because it can not. What the Gadfly sent you out to scavenge ingredients for, Bakkhos called his brew. In his words, it was the closest approximation he could manage to a flavor long since lost to time. A pleasant echo.”

An approximation. What Socrates called divine nectar, Bakkhos called an approximation. Was the Gadfly overestimating the elixir's ability to heal? Wasting our time on purpose, perhaps? It seemed too cruel for him. I hadn’t known the master of my master’s master for more than a few weeks, and the circumstances of our first meeting had been far from ideal, but somehow I felt confident about that much. Socrates was a Gadfly through and through, a critical old man with little patience for most things. But he wasn’t malicious. Not in the way a man would have to be to deceive an ill mother’s child into thinking they could have her back healthy and whole.

If the Gadfly was telling the truth as he saw it, though. If this pleasant echo he called nectar truly was potent enough to make well what the finest physicians could not even diagnose, then what did that say about the late kyrios’ standard? How high had he set his sights?

What had Bakkhos been drinking before?

“The only reason he was able to come as close as he did to that past pleasure, so he said, was because there were still some that remembered what the earth had long since forgotten,” Scythas continued, his focus drifting into recollection. “Dwelling beneath it.”

Two nights ago, in a voice that was not his own, Scythas had called upon a chthonic hero. Chthonic. Another word for infernal. Both descriptors of those that dwelled beneath, in the bleak underworld. And in response to the call, a dead man had answered him.

“He gathered his materials from the dead,” Griffon mused. “From the only fields that no man alive could harvest. From the only markets that wouldn’t accept any man’s mortal currency.”

“It would explain why he was the only one to brew it,” I said, taking another pull of freshwater that tasted like brine.

“Bakkhos forbade its synthesis,” Selene reminded me. “For as long as he lived, even in his kinder years, he made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate that sort of challenge.”

“Bakkhos was hated as much as he was loved,” I replied. “Likely even more so. If the materials were readily available, someone would have puzzled out the steps to synthesize it eventually. Someone would have taken the risk. But they weren’t available, were they? Not above ground.”

“Not here, at least,” Scythas confirmed. “The other locations marked on that map… I’m not sure. I might have a few ideas we can test, but none are as promising as this one here.” It was why he’d volunteered to come, rather than split off to cover more ground as Jason had. Our first destination was the one he felt he’d be most useful in.

“A golden cup of spirit wine,” Selene murmured. “Why from here?”

Scythas shrugged. “The kyrios had a saying he liked to share from time to time. As an Oracle in his care, I’m sure you’re even more familiar with it than I am.” The Hero of the Scything Squall cleared his throat, and once again spoke in a voice that was not his own. “The space where other tyrants keep their hunger-”

“I instead reserve for my thirst,” Selene finished, nearly groaning the words in her exasperation. “Yes, I’m familiar.”

“Exactly. To hear him tell it, his early years were an endless revel. He claimed once to have walked every step there was to walk in the land of his birth, drinking whatever there was to drink, wherever there was a drink to be found. Supposedly, the only reason Thracia is still spoken of as a land without boundaries is because he was never sober enough to mark them on a map. His words, naturally.

“In his mad wandering, he made his friends and he made his enemies. By the time he claimed his place in Olympia as the Tyrant Riot, the only difference between the two was how he’d laid their corpses to rest.”

My brow furrowed. “You don’t mean…”

“He didn’t kill them. At least, he didn’t kill his friends as far as I know. He didn’t have to. The kyrios was old by any standard. He was a man that had outlived his own era, drinking on while his contemporaries perished by the blade or by the bolt. Those that mortal wounds and tribulation could not strike down, Kronos took for himself in the end. Bakkhos simply outlived his peers until he was the only one left to bury them.”

How old was Bakkhos, really? the raven in my shadow asked the one in Griffon‘s. Under the cover of night, our shades could still mingle freely without Selene noticing.

Old enough, Griffon’s raven cawed while he contemplated the wreckage surrounding us.

“He buried his friends with full honors,” Scythas continued. “He gave them coin to cross the infernal river and refreshment to last them the journey, promising each in their passing to someday share a drink again. And though he never joined them-”

“Until he did,” Griffon remarked distractedly. Scythas scowled furiously.

“And though he never joined them, he still made good on his promises. He came back when it was within his power to summon them, though so much had been lost in the passage of time that the wine he brought to share was hardly worth the name, compared to what he’d buried them with. And in sympathy for the fond friend that had paid their way across the river, those long forgotten heroes returned the favor he had once done for them. They gave him a drink.”

“And his enemies?” I asked.

Scythas tried for a smile, but it was an uneasy thing. “Thracia is famous for its vineyards. Once, when he was ruinously drunk, Bakkhos explained to me that he had cultivated those vineyards himself, that he was as much the cause of their thriving as the nation’s fertile land. According to him, a grape vine’s growth was a question of nurture as much as it was nature.”

“‘It’s all in what you feed them’,” Selene concluded with her chin laid on my shoulder, a calm recitation of a mad Tyrant’s quote.

Ah.

“That’s not important, though. What’s important is how he buried his friends.”

“And where,” Griffon realized. He looked at our bleak surroundings with new eyes. “One of them is buried here. That’s why this place looks like a Greek built it with a Thracian’s hands. Bakkhos came back a more civilized man to visit the friend he’d buried, and when he did, he built a city over his corpse.”

I shook my head. Griffon blinked.

“Ho? Am I wrong?”

“Half wrong. Bakkhos didn’t build this city.” The signs and Scythas’ own words pointed to a chthonic friend being buried somewhere in the area, that we agreed on. But I had known from the moment we entered it that this city was a ruin entirely separate from the Greek diaspora. In spite of its similarities. Because of its similarities.

“And you know who did?” Griffon pressed me, skeptical. I nodded. “I suppose you know what they named it, too?”

“More likely than not.”

“You do?” Scythas asked, surprised.

“Tell us,” Selene urged me, squeezing my waist just hard enough to make me wince. “What’s the name?”

There was only one man that could have inspired the tragedy I’d seen in the wood of that gaping southern gate. When it came to naming his cities, he tended to follow a trend.

“Alexandropolis,” I named it. Scythas flinched at the word, and Selene’s grip tightened reflexively around my waist, hard enough to make me briefly see stars.

Griffon turned narrow eyes upon me. The raven in his shadow spread wide its wings and let loose an eerie, gurgling cry.

“What led you to that conclusion?”

“On the face of the gate when we entered,” I recalled, waving back the way we had come. “There was a symbol. A star with sixteen rays, or a wheel with sixteen spokes depending on who you ask. The mark of the Argead dynasty.”

“There was no such thing,” the former Young Aristocrat immediately denied. “I looked.”

“And you saw it. You just didn’t realize that you did, because someone had already scoured it from the gate. Burnt it beyond all recognition.”

“Beyond all recognition but yours?”

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug, making Selene’s head bob. “I’ve seen ruins like these before. They all bear similar marks.” I lifted my chin, gesturing up ahead.

The broken facade of a once grand statue loomed close enough now to see the finer details of it even in the dark. The statue was missing its entire upper half, but what remained still stood proud and tall. It was bare now, but I knew that in the past, when the tragedy of this city was still fresh, it had been draped with fine fabrics and whatever ornaments of wealth could be balanced on its frame. There would have been flowers. Copious offerings of food and blood. There would have been sorrow.

Those material markers had long since eroded or been stolen away. All that remained now was the echo of their hopeless pleas.

Griffon brandished rosy palms of violent intent, illuminating the broken sculpture. In the clarity of the dawn, the words carved into the marble base of the statue were plain to see.

Here at your feet we beg your forgiveness

Your cast off sons of Macedonia

Won’t you turn the wagon around?

Won’t you come back for us, Alexander?

“This was a military colony,” I said with certainty, because I had seen its like before. “Built by the Macedonians, for the Macedonians.”

“And someone tore it apart,” Scythas whispered, staring wide-eyed at the desperate inscription in the marble. “Who would dare-?”

“No one,” I said wearily. “No one but themselves.”

In the course of my travels, I had seen these sites before. I had seen for myself these haunted, broken places, hollowed out by the same hands that had first built them. I had seen Argead Stars scoured off of every surface, as well as bleak appeals carved into every holy monument. The empty cries of abandoned children.

These broken shell cities of Macedonia had unsettled me when I first beheld them as a legionary of a vibrant, thriving Republic. Now, they were worse. Now they hurt.

It had seemed absurd to me at the time, the idea that after everything they had done, a nation as great and powerful as Macedonia could fall to civil war in the end. How could internal strife be the blade that pierced their heart, when every external foe had only made them stronger? What could have possibly compelled them to cast themselves down on the precipice of unprecedented glory? I hadn’t understood it. Not then.

I understood it now.

Standing in the rubble of a Macedonian city’s corpse, all I could see was Rome.

1.81

The Young Griffon

On the third day, we sent the sea dog home.

The lands of Thracia were an unmarked expanse of snow capped mountain ranges and lush river valleys, with civilized settlements slim to none. My own Scarlet City had nestled itself between two mountain ranges and straddled a river, but the monuments and workings of stone that a city state required had altered that landscape in a profound way. Made it difficult to truly compare the land of my birth to these northern wilds.

Fertile land was a luxury in the greater western colonies that the Scarlet City presided over. And the lush fields on the outward facing edge of the eastern mountain range were a key contributor to an otherwise lackluster agricultural profile. Coarse bush plains and gnarled groves of olive trees were the norm, and so when it came time to fill his stomach, a man’s focus was drawn most often to that crystalline Ionian and the bounty beneath her waves. We had our grazers and our fleet-foots of course, and natural treasures besides - sulfur and salt most prominent among them. The title of bread basket, however, was firmly out of reach for us.

What I had seen so far of Thracia could have grasped that lofty title, and in the future still could if finer hands refined it. Lush fields of green and earth that sank beneath your feet, mountain basins full and overflowing with crisp clear water from the region’s frequent rains. The tribal nations themselves were an unfortunate stain, with their roving vagrant cities of wagons and temporary constructions.

The region made up for them, though. For every gangly red haired Thracian in a ridiculous hat and pants, there were hundreds of timeless pine trees and fruit bearing junipers within shouting distance of the Ebros river’s winding banks. Wild boar abounded in the thickets of their forests along with burnt auburn foxes and golden orioles. The good existed in far greater number than the Thracians, almost enough to forget them entirely.

And it was still only winter. This far north, that meant something. Closer to the Aegean, on the southern coast where the Greek colonies within Thracia were clustered, the chill was mild enough that the vineyard we had offered our sacrifice in was only lightly frosted over. But the further we progressed, the more frigid it became. Brutal Boreas had hidden half the nation beneath his winter veil, and it was still a marvel of natural fertility.

By our third day all the world seemed painted white, and every breath emerged as steam. The woolen heat of my new Thracian cloak was a substantial barrier against the chill, though it wasn’t as if I needed it. A true son of scarlet mystery was never bothered by heat, or lack thereof. Still, it had been a nice gesture from a friendly foreigner, so I wore it anyway.

Scythas bore it with a Hero’s advanced constitution, taking by heart flame what nature denied him and  whistling the occasional tune to disrupt the breezes that carried the worst of the cold. The girl, though never properly anointed in light of dawn or dusk, was equally unbothered. A product of Heroic flame or oracular inheritance, or more likely both. Sol suffered the chill as he did most things in his life - with stoic resignation.

The old sea dog we had brought along to help Scythas guide us seemed least affected of all, despite being the oldest and most frail by far. If anything, his expression grew brighter and his off-key singing warmer the further north we went.

Until we reached the reason for it, the humble frozen settlement among a hundred of its type that Khabur had once called home.

Even had I tried, I couldn’t have distinguished between the wandering city of tribals ahead of us and the ones we’d left behind us. The Korpiloi closest to the coast, or the Brenae above them. The distinction his eyes saw might have been in the patterns sewn into the cloaks and hanging tapestries that lined the tents and wagons of the nomad city, the blankets tucked around their children's shoulders or over their horses’ backs. Maybe it was their silly hats.

More likely, he saw it in their faces.

Old Khabur slid off his horse with a young man’s haste, a whispering compression of snow beneath his odd fawnskin boots when he landed. He had wasted no time acquiring regional attire when we landed days ago, spending all that he had managed to earn while using Nikolas’ heroic vessel as a fishing skiff. He looks ridiculous, with his colorful hemp cloak and his phrygian fox cap, to say nothing of the variegated bags his people called pants. But donning them had visibly moved him, and now he looked right at home with the vagrant city just down the frozen hill we’d crested.

The old Thracian sea dog stared longingly at his nomad city, but he took only one step towards it.

“I don’t suppose this is our stop?” he asked Scythas, forcefully clearing his throat when his voice cracked partway through.

“No,” the Hero of the Scything Squall denied, though it pained him to do it. “I’m sorry. We’re not there yet.”

“Right,” Khabur rasped, licking frost-chapped lips. That weathered face turned to me, and Sol beside me, “I only ask because I’ve seen these flags before. That’s the Diobesi down there. Well known for their brews, you see-”

“And their ugly old men,” I ventured. Khabur flinched.

“… aye, them too,” he admitted ruefully. “Forget I mentioned it. I’ll just-”

“Go,” I said. The old sea dog stared at me.

“Zibute?” Unwilling to hope.

“We’ll find our way without you, and I’m tired of looking at that unfortunate face. Return to your fellow barbarians and enjoy what’s left of your life.”

Wide eyes, closer to the pale milk hue of the Broken Tide Oracle than the Aetos’ own bright sky blue, darted from my face to Sol’s. Searching for insincerity and finding none. The old man’s broad hands trembled.

“I… thank you, but I can’t. I still owe you boys a debt-”

“You paid your debt at the oar,” Sol informed him. “Every day until your chains were broken. What followed has been a voluntary labor.” Looking down from his towering dark horse while a holy young woman held him from behind, leaning sideways to measure the old man for herself with eyes of burning scarlet glory, the Roman cut a certain figure.

Khabur was an old man and a sailor, until recently a slave - and before all that, he was a Thracian. He felt the captain’s presence even so. He stood up straighter. His trembling hands clenched into fists.

“Is it enough?” he croaked.

I raised an eyebrow. “We said it was, didn’t we? Now and once before. You chose to be foolish when we offered you salvation in the Rosy Dawn’s gratitude. Learn from your mistake, and take this secondary consolation before it too is lost.”

“Rest now, traveler,” Selene said kindly, affected majesty in her voice and her bearing. I suppose she could have been worse. “The journey ends as it began.”

“Your odyssey is over,” Sol declared. “Son of Thrace, free sailor of the sunlit seas, I hereby retire you. Take your horse and go.”

“My horse?” Dazed and hopeful as he was, Khabur nonetheless had the presence of mind to protest one last time. “I can’t take her too. Please, boys, don’t curse me with that generosity. Not when the Hero-”

A hand of my violent intent covered his mouth. His eyes met mine, the pupils shivering.

“Begone,” I told him.

It was an ugly thing to see an old man weep.

S

“That was… Kind,” Scythas said to me sometime later, while our horses crept through high mountain passes and the fourth night descended.

“You sound surprised,” Sol observed. The Hero of the Scything Squall pursed his pouting lips.

“I’m not surprised you agreed to it,” he said to my Roman brother. “I’m surprised that he initiated it.”

I considered the brumal glory above. At this elevation, treading near the peaks of Thracia’s frozen mountain ranges, the snow fell often and it fell heavy. Streamers and blankets of pure white flakes clouded the skies above and coated the land below. If not for her black mane and tail, my pure white runner would be all but impossible to see. The opposite was true of Sol and his black stallion.

“What do you see when you look at me, Scythas?” I asked the Hero, reaching up to catch the flakes of frigid heaven in my hand.

“What do I see?” He gestured for me to give him more. “Physically? Spiritually? Now, or in general?”

“There are no wrong answers,” I informed him, peering closely at the fragments of glory I had caught in my hand. Just as my foundational mystery could call rosy heat to my palms, so too could it call heat away. The snowflakes did not melt in a palm that was colder than mountain stone.

You’re tempting the Fates, the hungry raven lurking in Sol’s shadow reached out to inform mine.

How so?

An invitation of current speculation is an implication of future explanation.

Such refined articulation, the raven in my shadow cawed mockingly. Roman minds must have trembled when you spoke.

Sol sneered. Scythas will expect you to elaborate if you tell him his read of you is wrong.

Then I will. What do I have to hide?

Arrogant, irreverent Greek. Next time you provoke an unnecessary fight, I’m going to join in on the opposing side.

Promises, promises.

Our joined shadows undulated slightly, distorted by the ravens within as they beat their wings challenging lay at one another.

Just don’t expect me to soothe your ego when he batters it, Sol’s raven said.

Ho? You think I’m that fragile-

Both of us flinched and jerked back from stabbing pain. The taste of the Rein-Holder’s starlight bone marrow flooded my mouth, blood from a wound that I had never taken before in my life. I looked left, and at the same moment Sol looked behind, both of us staring at the culprit.

The daughter of the Scarlet Oracle had a spear in her hand, drawn from a fold in her myriad silks and rags. It had a ceremonial look to it - the bone white wood of its pole was covered tip to tip in elaborate carvings, some of them etched so deeply that the pole couldn’t have been thicker than a finger’s width in some places. The spearhead was freshly polished bronze. Ruinously fragile, the whole thing. Common sense and wood label it an ornament.

Selene held the ceremonial spear out at her side. For all appearances, she had stabbed it down at the open air.

It was the shadow the ornament cast, the penumbra spear, that had skewered our chattering ravens.

Her lips moved silently.

“It’s rude to carry on two conversations at once.”

She mouthed the words, trusting us to read her lips. She had noticed our shadowed conversation, as Anastasia had, but she could not join in herself. And she knew that any other form of communication would be heard by the man who was beloved by the wind.

I smirked and nodded fractionally. “Fair enough.”

Scythas, riding ahead of us on the high mountain trail, glanced back curiously as the girl talked her spear away again. The moment its shadow pulled away, Sol and I drew back our own silhouettes to nurse wounds we hadn’t known we could suffer until a moment ago. Selene smiled and waved pleasantly at the Hero. Scythas hesitantly returned it.

Eyes of hazel flame and golden embers shifted to me.

“When I look at you,” he mused. He looked me up and down, and I shifted and posed obligingly for him. Rather than annoy him, it seemed to cement the thought in his head. “When I look at you, I see a runaway flame.”

The snow fell freely.

“In what way?” I asked, relaxing from my artful pose and simply reaching up. Catching more snowflakes in my hands.

“On the night I met you, and every moment since, you’ve been doing everything in your power to disrupt the world around you,” Scythas explained. “Not once, not even for a moment, have you stopped.” He swiveled in his saddle to fully face us, comfortable enough with his mare and a Heroic cultivator’s poise to cross his legs ankle over ankle on her hind end and recline against her neck like she was a dining couch instead of a horse.

“Correct me if I’m wrong.” I added hands of pankration intent to my efforts, grasping skyward and catching snowflakes in their incorporeal palms. “But there was a distance of weeks separating our game of bone knuckles and our reunion in Bakkhos’ estate. You and I didn’t cross paths once during the intervening time.”

“We didn’t,” he admitted, “but I heard from those that did.”

“I only spent marginally more time with the Reaver than I did with you,” I pointed out.

“I’m not just talking about Jason. I’ve heard dozens of people speak about the twin ravens that hunger, hunting the hunters and terrorizing the terrors that keep junior mystikos up at night. I’ve heard rumors of the man that stalks the sanctuary city in the attire of a cult that he can’t possibly belong to - in silks that haven’t seen representation in Olympia since Damon Aetos swept the Olympic Games twenty years ago and spit in Old ‘Zalus’ eye.”

Sol’s shadow reached for mine. Selene laid her chin on his shoulder. The raven withdrew.

“It doesn’t help your case that they look like they belong to a mangled corpse,” Scythas said, flicking a finger distastefully at the ragged robes of scarlet and white that hung down from my waist. “Half the people that have seen you suspect you stole those from a grave, and the other half are convinced they are yours. And that you walked out of that grave yourself.”

Selene hummed. “Seems unlikely.”

“It does. But so do most things related to the Rosy Dawn.”

The Hero pulled a scarf of green silk from paradox logic and wrapped it loosely around his neck and jaw. With his faint stubble covered, he looked like no man at all. If anything, the crown of snowflakes on dark brown curls and the frost that clung to his eyelashes lent him an almost ethereal beauty.

“You make no effort at all to hide where you’re from, which made me think at first you weren’t from there at all,” the Hero of the Scything Squall continued. “For a long while, I assumed you were hiding your true affiliation the same way you were hiding your true standing. Pretending to come from the Rosy Dawn when you obviously had not, just as you were pretending to be a low-rank Philosopher when you’re anything but.”

“He is, though,” Selene said. She tilted her head, indicating the Roman whose shoulder she was leaning on. “Solus is too. Can’t you feel their pneuma?”

I couldn’t see whether or not his lips parted beneath his green silk scarf, but the flash of panic in Scythas’ eyes was plainly apparent.

“She doesn’t know?”

“The only one here that doesn’t know is you,” I said, fanning out my pankration hands and their snowflake bounties around me.

“Then why-?” Scythas’ eyes closed. “Solus. Tell me there aren’t two of them now.”

My stoic Roman brother glanced my way. I cocked an eyebrow. He looked down at the Oracle’s daughter, her chin still propped on his shoulder. She offered him a wink.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized to the Hero. Scythas quietly groaned.

“I’m better than her,” I said, honestly offended.

“You’re older than me,” the girl had the audacity to reply, as if she was correcting me. “And I suppose, as a member of my own mystery faith, that makes you my senior brother in a way. But age is hardly the only virtue. Youthful vigor has its own value, you know.”

“Are you calling me old?” I asked her incredulously.

“Ancient brother whom I have long admired,” Selene solemnly intoned, tucking her chin deeper into Sol’s shoulder in lieu of a bow. “I have no doubt that you were a terrible force in your prime, but the world has changed since then. “We’ve moved on with modern innovations - for example, the wheel.”

Sol smothered his amusement with a cough. Scythas’ canted eyes curled, not even bothering to try.

“I’ll break the wheel over your head,” I promised the smug Heroine.

“These days, we solve minor disputes with an innovation called discourse-”

A snowball struck her in the face and exploded.

“It’s rude to interrupt a conversation in progress,” I admonished the sputtering young woman. My precocious junior sister in scarlet faith stuck her tongue out at me.

In return, nine more pankration hands pelted her face with snow.

“You were saying?” I invited the Hero, speaking over the Heroine’s giggling protests. Scythas shook his head, but obliged me.

“I was saying that I used to think your Rosy Dawn attire was as authentic as your Sophic status.” A profound insight. “But the more I looked and listened for a truth to contradict the lie, the less I found. You immediately gave away the fact that you’re more than just a Philosopher-”

“But he is-” Selene began to insist, shielding her face from me with her hands. Sol slapped her with his own handful of snow while her focus was on the external enemy, swatting her like a bug on his shoulder. Her cry of “Sabotage!” was muffled by a mouthful of snow.

“-yet, the more I heard about your actions in Olympia, the less certain of that I became.” The Hero crossed his arms, eyebrows furrowing as he thought. “You came here with a Roman. You swagger through places you have no business even approaching, and you smack around young Philosophers of the Raging Heaven when they challenge your presence there. Like they’re your own junior initiates. Like they aren’t right to be suspicious of you.

“You present yourself as a lowly sophist and in the same breath challenge a Heroic Young Aristocrat’s authority - while standing in a club his family owns. You claim to be a junior Philosopher while your mouth is full of infernal bone marrow, and chase the agents of our Tyrants through the Raging Heaven’s halls as if they’re nothing more than the scavenging crows we named them after. You punch the Gadfly in his throat, and ridicule us for not doing the same. For not doing every mad thing you do.

“And then,” he snapped, leveling a damning finger at the space between my eyes, “You have the sheer gall to throw our standing back in our faces. You have the audacity to cite your fabricated standing while you shame us, as if to say that a fresh Philosopher’s strength is all that’s required to do the things you’ve done!”

“Scythas,” came the Roman’s voice. Sharp and lined with steel. The Hero clicked his tongue and whistled a note that made my ears ring, and the screaming gale winds that had risen up with his ire flickered and were abruptly silent.

“Apologies.” He exhaled slowly. When his eyes met mine, they were steady. “Since the day that Bakkhos died, in your every interaction, you’ve done whatever you can to evoke from the world what you nearly just evoked from me. The more I hear of you and the more I suffer you personally, the more I am convinced you’re from the Scarlet City after all.”

I waited patiently, recalling the ten pankration hands pestering Selene with snow and using them to catch more snowflakes.

“When I look at you, I see a starving dog that’s slipped his leash,” Scythas said, and the lack of heat behind the words made them twice as damning. “Sprinting away as fast as he can, confronting everything in his path with mad aggression born of hunger.”

Scythas uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, riding fully in reverse.

“When I look at the palette used to paint you, I see the blessing of the sun. When you reach out with the hands of your intent, I feel that blessing too. But a truth universally known is that a wise man keeps his distance from the sun, because it’s all too easy to burn. All too easy to be blinded.

“I believe you’re from that locked and bolted city because of how you act,” he told me. “Like you’re in possession of a map that charts the path straight up to heaven, and at the same time like a blind man that’s just stumbled out of a cave into the wider world. Like a starved dog or a runaway flame, devouring whatever you can reach. Heedless of the consequences, uncaring of who you hurt or how or to what degree. Lying as easily as you breathe. I believe you’re from that cursed place because I believe nearly nothing else you’ve ever said.

“It surprised me that you would take the initiative to free a good man for no gain but his joy,” Scythas concluded with firm conviction, “because when I look at you I see a scarlet son. Every story I’ve ever been told about the blinding dawn and scouring dusk, all the arrogance and the cruelty and the greed, like you were made instead of born.

“Like Damon Aetos molded you from clay himself.”

“That’s enough,” Sol decided. The Hero of the Scything Squall hummed, swiveling with inhuman alacrity to ride his mare in the proper orientation once more.

“As you say. I was finished anyway.” For the first time since I had known him, the Hero came away from a conversation with me sounding powerfully satisfied.

Sol’s shadow reached for mine, hesitated, and then connected when Selene nodded shallowly against his shoulder. For some reason, the girl looked sad.

I warned you, the hungry raven warbled, not unkindly. Downright tenderly, by the Roman standard.

Ah. I was being looked down on.

“I have another question,” I declared.

Scythas sighed and waved a hand without looking back, brushing my words aside. “I’m not going to debate this with you, Griffon. You asked me what I saw, and I told you. Weather or not you agree, you won’t persuade my eyes-”

“Not a debate,” I clarified. “A simple question.”

A weary beat passed. One more, and none after that.

“I won’t ask you for another word,” I promised.

“For the rest of the day. And tomorrow.”

I’d give him one better than that. “Until we die or each ascend, I won’t ever ask you anything again.”

“I’m serious.”

“So was I.”

Scythas seemed to give up on haggling, waving me on.

We need him, Sol’s raven reminded mine. There was weight behind the words that hadn’t been there when he cautioned me against confronting a group of drunken Thracians the day before. There was care, this time. And he’s been broken down enough.

I understand, I said. Sol frowned, but drew away.

“Who told you those things about me?” I asked. “My encounter with the young Philosophers of the Raging Heaven, the fact that it was me to challenge the Young Aristocrat in his family’s club and not Elissa or Kyno or Lefteris. Any of the things you claimed to have heard about me. All of them. Who told you?”

“No one.”

I nodded, satisfied. Snow crunch beneath plodding hooves, the only sound between us.

“… that’s it?” Scythas glanced back at me, confused. “No follow up?”

I shrugged. “I gave you my word.”

The Hero scoffed and faced forward again. “The Howling Wind Cult deals in air as the Scarlet City deals in fire. No one told me those things directly. No one had to. They told their stories to the people they trusted, or otherwise wanted to impress, and I overheard them.”

“You were that close?” Sol asked. Scythas shook his head.

“I didn’t have to be. Since I joined the Raging Heaven, every word spoken on Kaukoso Mons has been carried to my ear if I desired it. So long as the wind knows that I want to hear it, and so long as I’m kind, the breeze will bring it to me.”

“That.”

Three sets of eyes settled on me.

“That?” Scythas echoed, his voice clear despite the scarf covering his mouth. He didn’t have to raise it to be heard, because the wind would carry it to our ears as surely as it would our words to his.

“That is why I treat you all the way I do.” I considered the hands of my violent intent arrayed in rows around me. Raising them up close to my eyes, one by one, I considered the snowflakes they’d caught. Their shapes and simple symmetries.

“I was born in a locked and bolted city, as you said, and raised on stories of greater souls than those I saw around me. Wisemen, innovators of creative thought - architects and weavers and sweet voiced singers that invited tribulation simply because they were better at what they did than even the divine.”

My long-legged runner raised her head, snuffling quietly, and caught a snowflake on her tongue. In the instant before it melted, I saw that its shape was unlike any other in my hands.

“I grew up in a cave, captivated by the shadows I saw dancing on the walls,” I admitted, because it was true. “Cast by light of rose dawn, every one of them was a story. Each of them was someone worth telling stories of, a virtue in and of themselves - uniquely excellent souls. I thought that’s what every Hero was.”

I called light without heat to my palms, a phenomena of natural mystery, illuminating the finer details of every snowflake so each of my companions could see. Not a single one was exactly like another.

“I’ve never in my life heard of a man being able to sweet talk the wind that carries a spoken word,” I said, and didn’t bother hiding my wonder. “As far as I know, that is a virtue unique to you. Scythas, the Hero of the Scything Squall, and no one else. If it weren’t for that, if I hadn’t seen those glimmers of unique excellence that each of you carry in your souls, I might have been able to convince myself that none of you were Heroes at all.”

Scythas. Elissa. Kyno. Lefteris. Jason. Anastasia.

“But I have seen them,” I admitted in regret. “And I can’t pretend I didn’t. Which means as much as I hate that it’s true, you are the stories I was told, the glories that I was promised If I ever scaled the heights. You, the men and women that refuse to venture forward and risk what’s needed for the gains that you desire. You, the Heroes and Heroines that are hesitating because you know that no one has done what you have to do, ignoring the fact that no one has ever tried it with the abilities unique only to you.

“You are what I left that cave to find. I slipped my leash and burnt past my boundaries in search of the greater souls casting the shadows of my childhood idols, and outside I found only you.

“I am ravenous,” I said with quiet understanding. “And everything I’ve eaten since the day I left that cave has only made it worse. I’m a mad dog on the run, a fire burning out of control, but unlike Khabur I have not been voluntarily released. I act the way I do because I know what follows behind me, what seeks to leash me once again and douse me down to embers.

“That’s why each of you disappoints me. That is why I shame you. Not just because I am cruel, not just because I am arrogant, not only for my greed. It’s because I left my world to find you, and I thought you would be more.”

Heat returned to match the rosy light of dawn. The snowflakes melted in my hands, pooling together as water in my palms.

“In a way,” I murmured, “I suppose that too was an appeal to higher power.”

The Hero Scythas didn’t speak another word for the rest of the day. I didn’t prompt him to.

I’d made a promise after all.

S

On the fourth night, we found our cup of wine ensconced in Orphic mystery.

1.80

The Son of Rome

The Thracian kingdom could hardly be called as such. In my time I had seen some truly dilapidated capitals, and borne witness to some heinously destitute kings, but they had always carried with them a sense of primitive weight. The Celtic kings were at least properly crowned, the hulking Gauls could at least build serviceable walls, and for all that the Egyptians disgusted me in a deep and personal way, I could not deny the magnitude and grandeur of their cultural works.

For all my qualms with the kingdoms through which Gaius had campaigned, there had been no other way to describe them. What Scythas led us through after two days’ hard riding was not at all like that. To call the sprawling settlement a kingdom at all was a disservice to the name.

It was hardly more than a loose collection of nomads and their camps. Wagons and beasts of burden abounded: the stench of horse shit was so pervasive that it soon drifted into the background of my sensory perceptions, occupying the same place as the sound of my own breathing and the taste of my own saliva. Shaggy hunting dogs ran wild alongside herding hounds, playing roughly or otherwise provoking the livestock and the children of the settlement.

This particular tribe called themselves the Korpiloi, or at least that was what the Greeks called them. The Thracian in our group hadn’t cared enough to correct them. There were a few oddities of that nature that I had noticed since the Babel shard had settled itself inside my soul. On occasion, I would hear the same concept delivered by two different cultural sources, and recognize two entirely different words despite the subject being the same.

For example, the river that this valley tribe of Thracians had spread themselves along - the Ebros River.

The Ebros fed directly into the Aegean sea, and had for various reasons been the point of entry Scythas had decided upon. When he had indicated it on the map and Griffon had spoken its name aloud, I had heard the underlying word that he spoke in his native Alikoan, Ebros, but the Babel shard had translated it as wide. Ebros, the wide river. When our Thracian sailor had later repeated it, the underlying word had been the same, Ebros - but the Babel shard had told me splasher. The same word, but a different meaning applied by each culture.

Regardless of whether the name was theirs or what they had been given, they were the Korpiloi to us. And no matter what they called themselves, they were hardly fit at all to be called a kingdom.

The Republic hadn’t qualified as a kingdom either, of course, but that was a product of cultural progression. This, as far as I could tell, was a regression from the barbarian standard that I had come to expect. The only other race I had seen come close to this was the Britons, and even those vile swamp people had rallied around their vile swamp king.

These Thracians just… Wandered. Up and down the winding valleys and through the mountain trails. They were large on the average, taller than the average Greek or Roman though without the overbearing bulk that made the Gallic tribes so fearsome. The inhabitants of the loose communities that we rode past, and in some cases, through, by and large lacked the sculpted definition that the Greeks so famously aspired towards. They were large, yes, but painfully lean or otherwise sloppily built.

Whether that was a genetic trend or or a trait unique to this tribe, I couldn’t say. Khabur had warned us that the mountain tribes were far and away more vicious than those that hugged the valley rivers. Perhaps that hard mountain living translated to finer physiques. Or, more likely, it brought them closer to the legion aesthetic than the Greek. Rugged Bodies to match their minds, both well suited to war.

I doubted it was a meaningful difference in the end, though. Docile valley tribe or brutal mountain men, they were all barbarians. My formative years had prepared me for ventures like these, but the first step into a new world was a shock no matter how many times you experienced it. Like diving headfirst into the frigid sea in winter. I was able to distance myself from the initial wonder quickly enough, falling back on the familiar expectation of a legionary far from home - I was here to accomplish something. For as long as that was true, nothing would sway me from that purpose. No matter how alien or bizarre.

Unfortunately, Griffon and Selene had no such restraint.

§

“The further we progress, the less I believe the Tyrant Riot was born and raised in a place like this,” Griffon said, while we settled our horses by the Ebros for a brief stop later that afternoon.

The timber of his voice was familiar. Equal parts deep disdain and baffled wonder. I remembered being almost exactly the same when I first ventured into Germania and saw what people lurked in the shadowed groves of their nation spanning forest. He hid it well, and maintained his usual facade of leonine apathy, but he couldn’t hide his true response from me.

The former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn devoured the Koripiloi tribe with his eyes, drank their river dry with every deep and relishing breath. He sneered at most everything he found, but he had not once withdrawn his curious influence since we reached the outer limits of the settlements.

“And why is that?” Scythas asked, dismounting from the mare that I had initially chosen and stretching while she dipped her head and drank greedily from the river.

Griffon gestured vaguely at a nearby cluster of wagons and cloth tented homes. A group of over a dozen men sat bundled up around a raging fire, though it was more like they sprawled. Their faces were flushed nearly the same shade as their auburn hair, and every man carried a horn cup in his hand. Periodically, their children and wives would come out to refill their horns before returning to their tents.

They were rowdy, and they were loud. Deep within their cups.

“Look at how they drink,” Griffon said as if that was an answer enough. As far as a Greek is concerned, I suppose it was. “A thinking man knows how to handle his wine. These savages clearly do not. Tell me, Khabur, Is this behavior uncommon among your kind?”

“Can’t say it is,” the old Thracian admitted. His expression was wistful as he looked over at the drunken congregation. “Far as I know, we all take our drinking a bit more serious than your lot.”

I had experienced both sides of that coin. The Greeks viewed libation as a civilized practice, and water their wine down to the point where they could drink it throughout the day without it overwhelming their senses. Even kykeon, the spirit wine that their cultivators drink, was only ever imbibed at its fullest strength during periods of religious significance. The rights at the Rosy Dawn had been my first time tasting undiluted Greek spirit wine. After that, I had understood why they diluted it.

The patricians in Rome followed a similar practice, associating the drunken mania of overindulgence as barbarism simply put. If a man’s cup was deep enough, even the consul could be regressed to a slavering beast at the bottom of it. That was a shame that no patrician wanted to suffer, and so my time at the villa had been characterized by watered down wine as well.

In the legions, however, luxuries were taken as they came. For better and for worse. God help a man if he overindulge and shirk his duties as a consequence, because his centurion would not - but if a legionary did what was expected of him and buried himself in undiluted drink during his leisure hours, a blind eye was generally turned. Life on campaign was cruel enough as it was. And, of course, as the first of Gaius’ legions to accept the tribals into her ranks, the fifth tended to enjoy those small luxuries more than most.

Having been on both sides of the cup, I couldn’t say I disagreed entirely with Griffon’s mindset. Though there was a time and a place for letting go.

A few of the drunken men sitting around the fire waved and hollered as they noticed us. Invitations to come drink and taunts about our state of dress, Griffon’s in particular. The former Young Aristocrat snorted and ignored them, raising an eyebrow at Scythas.

“How can these be his people? I confess I didn’t know Bakkhos like you did, but I assume the man that presided over the nexus of the civilized world for centuries was not a worthless rowdy lush.”

Scythas winced. Scarlet eyes narrowed.

“No,” Griffon said, a flat word.

“It is in the name, after all,” Selene said simply. She tore her wandering eyes away from the greater mountains rising up around us just long enough to offer him a briefly sympathetic look.

In contrast to the other sunkissed member of our group, she had been open and unashamed of her fascination since the Eos had set sail from Olympia. Every sight was one she hadn’t seen before, every sound and smell, and each of them came as a joy to her, without any of the accompanying disdain that Griffon projected. It was difficult not to look at her and feel a bit lighter.

“Bakkhos,” Scythas said, lest he forget it again. “Loud. Riotous. He didn’t take that name by mistake.”

Loud and riotus were apt descriptions of the campfire crowd hackling us further up the river.

“The Mad Tyrant,” I mused, invoking another of his titles. Wine mania was a common affliction the further one strayed from civilized cultures. Still, there was something… “Bakkhos isn’t his true name either?”

“It is and it isn’t,” Scythas said, wavering his hand in a half-truth gesture.

“Meaning?” I asked. Griffon, meanwhile, was staring into the middle distance while the hands of his violent intent cut his chin and dug their knuckles into his temples.

“The kyrios was born and raised in Thracian fields, but his parents weren’t the ones to raise him. He grew up with a vine keeper’s family, and when he was old enough to understand it they told him the truth of his origins - left abandoned in a field of teeming grape vines by his true parents, half-buried in the soil like they had tried to bury him alive and given up part way. Like he was just another sprouting vine.

“The vine keeper explained this to him, and knowing then that that family was not his family after all, the kyrios decided to name himself. Bakkhos was his choice. Bakkhos, he told me, because the vine keeper had once confessed that he was the noisiest infant in the world, and that was the only reason he found him.”

“A trait he carried with him into adulthood,” I extrapolated wryly. Scythas sighed and nodded.

“Bakkhos was unmatched in many respects. Restraint was not one of them.”

“You mean to tell me,” Griffon said slowly, biting out each word like it caused him visible pain, “that the greatest man Olympia had to offer, the towering central pillar of the Raging Heaven’s virtue, was a hedonist?”

“Not a hedonist,” Selene corrected him. “The hedonist.”

Griffon’s pneuma rose.

For a man so vain, he despised the reflection of a mirror more than most.

A ball of bunched up wool hit the ground and rolled towards us, thrown by one of the drunken men around the fire. I watched the man to do it stand up and condemn himself, taking a pull from his hollow horn cup and cupping his empty hand around his mouth so his voice would carry.

“Cover yourself up! Even a Greek woman ought to show a bit of modesty!” he jeered, the Babel shard even translating his drunken slur.

“Hold on,” Scythas said, as Griffon slid wordlessly off his horse and retrieved the bundle of wool with a pankration hand. It unfurled into something like a cloak, long enough to fall past his knees and stitched with bright designs of color, winding horizontal lines that gave an effect of layering. A few more of the drunkards laughed and hollered for him to try it on.

Griffon started walking their way.

“They’re only drunk!” Scythas tried. “Remember what Solus told you at the funeral- diplomacy!”

Ah, right. I had said that, hadn’t I.

“Things will go smoother for us if we remain on good terms with the locals,” I put forward, to which Scythas and Khabur vehemently agreed. I knew it was wasted breath.

“I agree,” Griffon said with complete sincerity, donning the woolen cloak and smiling sharply at the fireside crowd’s howling laughter. “This is a fine garment. The least I can do is thank them for it.”

He strode with purpose over to the Thracian crowd. Whether or not they were cultivators, I couldn’t tell. But there were over a dozen of them, and a couple were nearly as large as Kyno. Each and every one turned to watch curiously as the Greek approached. They had no larger weapons at hand that I could see, but several of them were using daggers to cut meat from a spit-roasted boar.

“Get back on your horse, Khabur,” I told the Thracian. “We’ll have to rest them later.”

“He’s not going over there to thank them, is he?” Selene murmured knowingly.

“No,” I sighed. “He is.”

I didn’t hear exactly how he phrased it, not from that distance, but the Heroic cultivators with me did. At the same time they winced and grimaced, the cocky and jovial faces of the Thracian men around the fire darkened. One of them snapped something, stepping towards the scarlet son and brandishing his carving knife.

Griffon replied.

“Fuck me,” Scythas hissed, and kicked his mare into a gallop away from the crowd and further up the river. Khabur followed directly on his tail.

“Should we leave him to it?” Selene asked, peering over my shoulder as Griffon roundhoused the first man to take a stab at him.

If only.

“Give us a minute,” I told her instead, dismounting from the black charger. When the stir-crazed warhorse shifted its weight ominously, I wrapped as much of my hand around its muzzle as I could and pulled its head down so its eyes met mine. “Stay.”

I turned up the river bank and cracked my neck as the air filled with Thracian howls and curses.

Time for a brawl.

1.79

The Young Griffon

For the concept of a greater to exist, a lesser was also required to give it meaning. For a man to be notably tall, a distance notably far, a body of water notably deep, there had to be a corresponding norm that each of them surpassed. It followed, then, that for a greater mystery cult to exist, there would have to be a corresponding lesser. Something profound enough to inspire virtue, and opaque enough that no living Greek had ever unraveled its mystery - but less so than the institutions that the great city-states called their own.

These lesser mysteries were the source of inspiration for most men of virtue. Logistically, it was impossible for things to be any other way. A Greek cultivator was an exceptional existence, but the greater mystery cults were even more exceptionally selective than that.

A man had ten choices and ten choices alone if he coveted the pursuit of highest virtue.

This was the first and in some ways most important decision he would have to make in his life. The pursuit of heaven was a hopeless dream no matter where you stood. But for a child uninitiated, the pursuit of membership in a greater mystery cult seemed very nearly as hopeless.

The choice of which to pursue was crucial. Each cult valued different things in a mystiko, required skills that more often took years than months to properly hone. In deciding on an institution to pursue, you were committing yourself to one at the expense of nine. As a young man, or even a boy, you were forced to invest all of yourself into that singular goal and ignore the possibility - the greater likelihood - that your true unknown potential resided somewhere in the other nine.

The considerations of filial expectation, geography, and financial logistics

limited most burgeoning cultivators’ options to greater or lesser degrees. The final choice, however, remained theirs. Families advised and a man’s means confined, but universally known was the reality that every cultivator faced heaven alone. In the end, the young man decides. In the end, even the boy must choose.

Responsibility of that magnitude is a cruelty when thrust upon a child. It is a necessary cruelty, though - the first of many more to come. Making that choice and suffering what follows is fundamental. It changes a person. For better and for worse, it is the first time in a cultivator's life that it truly matters that they are alive. Their first act that no one but themselves could have possibly put forward. A joy and a sorrow uniquely theirs.

Unless, of course, they were born into a greater institution. In that case there was no need to worry. No trials were required for them to take in hand what less privileged souls were fighting and clawing and desperately living to one day possibly achieve.

No, certainly not. Nothing so unsightly for the brightly shining heirs. It was only natural that the free world’s fortunate sons would receive as gifts what the masses had no other option but to steal - like cursed fire from the heavens.

Men like Alazon and Gianni Scalla were above that lesser struggle. Children like my cousins had greater pursuits to occupy their time. As did I.

All my life, I had never once been cursed with a choice.

At any rate.

Eight city-states were home to ten greater mysteries. It simply wasn’t enough for even an above average cultivator to win admittance. Let alone an average cultivator, or even worse, an unrefined soul. Perhaps if the kyrioi were more generous these institutions could have found ways to spread their wonders to the masses. But they were not. If they had been, it was doubtful they’d ever have made it to where they were today.

Instead, those less privileged than the free world’s prodigies and her aristoi built what monuments they could with the materials available to them. They observed what there was to be observed. They cultivated what virtue they could find. And lacking the greater mystery of, say, a fallen sun god, they instead contemplated humbler phenomena. Down-to-earth discoveries, some would call them.

Though under the earth was perhaps a more apt description.

“What was that?” Sol finally asked once the second chthonic hand receded, that storm flashing in his eyes as he glared daggers at the earth. The riptide pull of his influence doubled and redoubled, drawing our horses unconsciously towards him even as they screamed. I smacked my white mare on her neck, breaking his sway over her with my own. She huffed and danced nervously away.

“You’ve never seen a lesser mystery before?” Scythas asked quizzically, wiping horse blood off on his faded green attire.

“I’ve seen many things that could be called mysteries. None of them have looked like that.”

“Ah, true. I suppose this is a different flavor of madness than what you’re used to.” The Hero glanced in the direction the ink-black hand had pointed, then down at the soil where his mare had been dragged under. The hand had taken even the blood from the soil. All that remained were the drops on the grapevines and what he had on his own hands.

“You’ll need another horse,” Selene observed, unplugging her ears. The scarlet flames behind her eyes flickered and cast uncertain embers from their corners. “Those directions weren’t very specific.”

A poor reward for the sacrifice offered. Of course, she didn’t say that out loud. Not while we were still standing overtop of the receiver.

“It’s enough,” Scythas assured her. “In the meantime, I’ll walk.”

“Impossible,” the old Thracian said at once. Khabur heaved himself down from his dappled mare, patting her flank. “I’d never sleep another wink if I let a Hero walk while I rode a horse he’d rented for me. Take her.”

“I appreciate your intent,” Scythas said, a bit awkwardly. “But, the pace we’ll be keeping…”

“You’re too slow, old man,” I told him frankly. Khabur grunted and smacked his thighs, each impact a meaty sound.

“Don’t waste your worry, žibùtė. This old dog’s still got a few years left in him,” he assured me. It wasn’t difficult to believe him.

Of all the worthless sea dogs that we had left the Eos to, he was perhaps the least useless of them all. He was tall, even a bit taller than Scythas, which was remarkable for a man that had never refined himself. He had been skin and bones when we took him from the slave galley, but already he had filled out to something nearly formidable again. Broad-backed and thick-wristed. His hands were as large as mine and littered with calluses and scar tissue that stood out from otherwise leather tanned flesh.

He had no hair on his head. Perhaps a cosmetic choice, perhaps a product of slavery‘s stress, or maybe just Kronos leaving his unshakeable mark. He still had his beard, at least, and most of it had even retained its striking auburn shade.

The rest of our sea dogs were each a ruinous combination of too small, too weak, too stupid or belligerant to be of value even in a field. Khabur the Thracian, to his credit, was merely old. In his time, I could imagine him making a go of what he was suggesting. Even more beyond that. If Sol and I had found him before Kronos, then…

Well. It didn’t matter now.

“Get back on your horse,” Sol commanded, and Khabur had no choice but to obey.

“We can ride together, at least -”

“The mares are too small to ride double.” I smirked faintly at the betrayed look Khabur sent my way. “The Hero has offered to walk and is assuredly faster than you. You’ll learn to sleep with the guilt, or the Eos will have gained a tireless oarsman. Neither outcome will upset me.” I didn’t dislike the old Thracian, but that didn’t mean I’d humor him.

“The stallion is strong enough for two,” Sol decided. As if it had understood him, the black horse with the blacker attitude snapped its teeth and pounded the soil with broad hooves.

Scythas eyed the beast doubtfully.

“It’s just a horse,” Sol said impatiently.

The stallion glared at Scythas. Its eyes were yellow and hateful.

“It can’t be helped,” Selene said, sounding not at all exasperated as her words implied. The girl in the sunray silks and philosopher rags swung her legs around so she was sitting side saddle, braced her hands on her mare’s back, and pushed.

Her mare shifted its legs like it had been lightly shoved, but the daughter of the Oracle soared up and across the gap between her horse and Sol’s, flipping head over heels and landing adroitly behind him on the stallion’s bare back. He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she smiled winningly.

“I knew we’d meet again,” she said, rubbing the black horse’s flank. “Let’s get along this time, hm?” The beast threw its head back and reared up on its hind legs, screaming as it sought to throw her-

Sol wrapped an arm around the stallion’s neck and viciously choked it.

“You were lamenting that I chose you before, weren’t you? I could hear it rattling around that empty head of yours,” I said soothingly to my own slender white runner. “I bet you don’t regret it anymore.” My long-legged mare whinnied softly and leaned into the pankration hands that were currently stroking her head and massaging heat into her fatigued limbs.

“You’ll break before I do,” Sol, by contrast, was promising his stallion while it gagged.

“He just needs a little discipline, that’s all,” Selene insisted, one arm wrapped around Sol’s waist to keep steady. Her eyes lit up in the literal sense. “And perhaps some encouragement! Treat him like one of your soldiers!”

Sol tightened his choke hold and leaned in by the black beast’s ear.

“I will tie you in a sack filled with snakes and throw you into the river.”

The stallion’s eyes bulged.

In the end, Scythas took on the docile mare that had first passed from Sol to Selene, and the two of them rode the stallion. We rode hard through the night, the Hero and the Thracian discussing the different tribes in the region and our likelihood of passing through each of them. The hand of liquid shadow had pointed us vaguely, the girl hadn’t been wrong about that; but Scythas seemed confident enough, and Khabur’s familiarity with the area was sufficient to fill the gaps that did exist in his mental charter.

As we rode, the raven in Sol’s shadow reached out to mine.

What the fuck is a lesser mystery?

He glared at me when my shadow laughed, its gurgling caw a sharp and ugly sound.

You acted like you knew.

I said I’ve seen mysterious things in my life. I then clarified that I’ve never seen anything like that.

That was a Hero’s cult, my shadow explained to his, amused. A chthonic institution, lesser to the likes of the Rosy Dawn and Raging Heaven.

What cult? Where? We were in the middle of a vineyard. Where was the temple? Where were the initiates?

I shrugged. Same place as the Hero, I’d imagine. The underworld.

Some things were simply common knowledge. Before now, I had never personally seen a direct appeal to a Mystery Hero’s chthonic cult, but I had known since I was young that there was a reason we distinguished between Philosophers and Heroes the same way we did between unrefined souls and cultivators of virtue. A man was mortal all the way up to the tenth rank of the Sophic Realm. Past that point, he was more than a man. Not quite yet a god. Something in between, semi-divine.

That being the case, if our faceless divinity could persist beyond death, it followed that our Heroes could do something similar. Perseverance, not through death as the divine might. But within it. A half remembrance.

Lesser. Yet still profound.

The lay of the land, and the deeper relation between the greats and their lessers. This was all knowledge that any Greek cultivator could be expected to know. Alas, Sol had been brought up in a legion, and Aristotle was a bastard.

I was left with no choice but to make up for their lack. My raven explained the circumstances surrounding a cultivator’s first unlikely pursuit, and what remained for them if they failed, as we rode through the Thracian countryside and dark gave way to dawn. There were worse ways to pass the time.

A cultivator has ten choices if they desire the best of what this world can offer them. I had assumed your mentor would have taught you that much if nothing else at all, but it seems the Father of Rhetoric had other ideas for you.

Why bother priming me on Greek mysteries I had no intention of seeing? Sol replied, defensive of the men that had failed to properly raise him as always. Aristotle couldn’t have known I’d end up here.

I wondered about that.

Whatever the case. Before a cultivator’s journey begins, there are ten high roads that they can walk.

Should they choose to brave our cruel and perilous West, to mark their worth in passing days and burn their soul asunder, the sunlight cults might take them. If coals can be tread and dark thus traversed, they just might make it through the hallowed mountain halls of the fallen sun god. Whether by light of Rosy Dawn or heat of Burning Dusk, they can find their faceless faith in the Scarlet City of Alikos.

If the cultivator possesses deep and noble roots, they can venture to the lauded Coast and prove their worth in the heart of free civilization, there twice submerging their soul. If they can part the waves like a seaside cliff, the Broken Tide might break them. If they can brace the lines like a campaign foot, the Brazen Aegis might shake them. Either way, they can find their faceless faith in the twice-exalted Coast.

If they are rather she, or else man enough to defy Her, they can stalk through lands of Eastern silk and there let fly their soul. If their aim is true and their rhythm in-tune, through shadowed groves the Blind Maiden might hunt them. United as sisters or deflowered as lovers, the cultivator can find their faceless faith in the Obsidian City of the Amazons.

If bound for blood and mad at heart - if calmer minds won’t have them - they can march to south Peloponnese and re-cast their soul in crucible iron. If pain is their first and closest friend, and provided the threat of death excites them, the Infernal Frenzy might descend and in the press incite them. Assuming exsanguination does not take them before virtue, they can find their faceless faith in the war torn city of Lacedaemonia.

If they know and welcome their hunger, they can measure their worth in the weathering of gales and cry out their name into the tempest that upended the bread basket. If their voice is sweet sin and their ears are sharp as wheat sickles, they may just hear the Howling Wind reply. In the event that they make it up, they can find their faceless faith in the floating city of the Hurricane Heights.

If not by the coast and not by the colony - if not by Greek mainland at all - they can rig up their worth and try for the sea, to settle their soul in isles of shifting alabaster. If their stride can match the Strider and their words can reach the deafened, the Waning Wax might melt them. With golden thread to guide them there, they can surely find their faceless faith among those Alabaster Isles.

If they are no Greek at all, a free citizen by technicality alone, they can scrounge for their worth in lands of ancient wonder and in Egypt there find their lost soul. If their stomach can stand the sight of their fellows, and their lips resist the urge to sneer, they will likely be welcome in the cult of Scattered Foam. Unlikely as it is, if they retain what is theirs and do not emerge a mongrel Macedonian hound, they can find their faceless faith even there in the Conqueror’s Pearl City.

And of course, if they are great enough for any and all of those greater institutions, they can set their sights as high as holy Olympia. If they are everything a free city desires, curious and passionate and hungry, they’ll find their virtue lurking somewhere inside the immortal storm crown. In baptismal lightning, the Raging Heaven might even anoint their soul. Without question, they can find their faceless faith in the Half-Step City.

These are the roads most coveted and least often traveled. That being said, they are far from the only options available to a cultivator. If none in ten decide to take them, their mother in the earth will always provide. We’ve laid to rest our Heroes and their Golden Age has passed, but that isn’t a reality they’ve necessarily accepted. And as you well know, a Hero’s nature is the same in every era.

Defiance of greater imposition, came Sol’s pensive reply.

Just so.

Even the final imposition, greatest of them all.

I’ll tell you a story about one of those Heroes, I decided. So pay attention. This man was foreign-born, just like you, and when he died he was one of our own. Though compared to you, he was easier on the eyes and sweeter with a lyre.

He played? Sol’s raven warbled, interested.

I hummed, nodding. The story goes that even bees could be charmed out of their honey when they heard him pluck his strings. We called him the Thracian, while Thracians called him the Augur. In the course of his life, most knew him only by his heavenly hands and the splendor of his voice. In the end, however, his name was Orpheus.

§

On the second day, we reached our kingdom of savages.

1.78

The Son of Rome

“The kyrios of the Raging Heaven was a Hero before he was the Tyrant riot,” Scythas spoke softly as we rode beneath the light of stars. “And before that, he was only a man. Dutiful, and later wise, but ultimately no greater or lesser than any other mortal soul.”

A half moon rose steadily up above while we traversed the Thracian countryside. Griffon led the way with his virtue, rosy pankration hands hanging like lanterns around our heads and drifting with the current of his thoughts. The constructs of pneuma idly flexed their fingers, clenched and unclenched, contorted in various ways while they cast their light. Occasionally my horse would snap at a limb that got too close, but the others didn’t seem to mind.

“Cultivators in the fourth realm of Tyrants rarely speak of their lives prior to winning glory, as a rule. Even the most insufferable of them will never offer up details of their mortal lives without good reason. A quirk of their status, I suppose.”

“A preventative measure,” Griffon said, unbraiding his white mare’s mane. He’d yet to find a style that suited his tastes- or hers, maybe.

Scythas grimaced. “It’s the likely answer, yes. The most treacherous path is the one no man has walked before. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover they kept the past to themselves so no one could follow their example. Any knowledge could be useful.”

That much I knew was true from the tales told in the fifth. The more recent story of Damon and Anargyros Aetos’ first heroic deed was simply the point proven.

“That much is true,” Griffon agreed. “But it isn’t what I meant.”

“No?”

“As young scholars of greater mystery, we are taught that knowledge is a strength all its own. Even if all a man knows is the question and not the answer, one eye is better than blindness. To know that you do not know a thing is the first step to understanding it. The spring from which virtue and refinement flow.”

“Yes, I’m a cultivator too. What does that have to do with this?”

It was the thesis statement of Greek cultivation, their culture’s core conceit. The grander the complexity and the more opaque mystery, the more there was to be gained from understanding it.

In one of my boyhood lectures, Aristotle had explained Greek cultivation to me as the untangling of a knot. In Rome we knew cultivation as the succession of a soul. In the time since my world had ended, most all of the Greeks I had encountered referred to it as the refinement of a soul. But Aristotle had told me that every man was a tangled mess inside his soul, and so he had declared the act of cultivation to be the untangling of that knot.

Your Romans call this progression the course of honors,  the Macedonians call it the hitching of stars, and many Greeks call it the stairway to heaven. Don’t confuse yourself, boy. Think of what we do in terms of a single length of rope.

The Greek perspective was that a man’s external reality mirrored his internal reality - or perhaps vice versa, or even both at the same time. Their great works of architecture and miracles of civil engineering were the direct result of this mindset. The Greeks desired beauty of self, order over chaos, and so they also imposed that beauty and order on the world outside of themselves as well. Their cultivation was the same.

There is a mystery inside every man’s soul. A question that he spends his entire life trying to answer. The Greek mystiko seeks to unravel the external mystery of their worldly faith at the same time as they seek to unravel their own internal mystery. We call that virtue.

External and internal, inextricably linked. Even in death, a king could be distinguished from a slave by the monuments built in their memory- a grand mausoleum as opposed to an undecorated mound. That was why every Greek child coveted initiation in a cult of greater mystery. Because every cultivator wanted to believe that the mystery in their soul was more profound than any other.

And there was no external reflection more profound than the Greek subjects of greater mystery.

As I understood it, the source of inspiration for a Greek cultivator's virtue was itself an omen of things to come - nearly a prophecy for their own personal journey. To draw virtue from exposure to greater mystery meant that Olympus itself was within your means. On the other hand, to draw your virtue from a citizen’s simple life meant you were bound for a citizen’s simple death. A rule of thumb, as Aristotle had labeled it with some disdain.

The common interpretation is that cultivation is set once foundation is settled - one virtue, one mystery, and only one path to heaven. It follows that the mystery studied must be profound enough to reach heaven alone. Think of the cultivation realms as the distance between heaven and earth. Your place among them is however far the rope can reach.

To advance was to untangle a bit more of the knot. Ascending to heaven, climbing Olympus mons, meant bridging the gap between mortality and divinity with understanding. If your mystery was too simple, too crude or uninspiring, you could untangle the entire knot and lack the rope needed to make it to heaven.

But if the tangled rope within was the one a man used to pull himself up to heaven, why did it matter from where without he took his inspiration?

Because, boy, a man is an arrogant and prideful creature - and a Greek is even more so. We assume that the gods sculpted our bodies in their image, as we assume they gave us the spark from their own souls. In all things, within and without, we hold this to be true:

As above, so below.

A pankration hand drifting by my head snapped its luminous fingers, drawing my focus back to the present. Griffon and Scythas were both watching me expectantly. Khabur, plodding along on his mare, looked like he might fall asleep out of his saddle any moment.

“They want to know what you think,” Selene whispered covertly, the dappled mare I’d passed off to her trotting alongside my stallion. The stallion snorted and lashed his tail in the mare’s face, but didn’t otherwise bother her.

“What I think about what?” I asked, and she hushed me as if everyone including the Thracian Saylor hadn't heard her ‘whispering’.

“I’m of the opinion that knowledge is power, and knowledge of a thing gives you power over it. Even a Tyrant,” Griffon explained, tilting his head towards the Hero of the Scything Squall at the same time his floating lantern hands all swiveled to point at him. “This one believes otherwise.”

“Knowledge alone is not strength,” Scythas asserted. “Strength is strength. Knowing how a man became strong is not the same as gaining that strength for yourself.”

“I never said that.”

“Then what did you say?”

“Knowledge is power. Not strength.”

An expression came over Scythas’ face that I had only ever seen while he was talking to Griffon. A look of suffering and resignation.

“What is the distinction?”

“Strength is Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill until the end of time,” Griffon answered without hesitation. “Power is Sisyphus letting the boulder go.”

Scythas’ brow furrowed in knee-jerk scorn, before the lines smoothed out and his frown became thoughtful.

Selene added to the point. “Strength is the force we can exert,” The pressure we can withstand. “Power is freedom to act. It’s our ability to choose how we exert that force, or if we do at all.

“And it is the ability to take that choice away from those beneath us. Sisyphus is strong, even in death - but he has no power at all.” Griffon glanced curiously at the Oracle’s daughter. “Who taught you that interpretation?”

“My father,” Selene said fondly. Griffon hummed.

“So did mine.”

As had mine, adopted. Another Tyrant quirk, I supposed.

“Then by your definition,” Scythas said consideringly, “you’re saying that knowledge of a Tyrant’s mortal life gives you the freedom to act against them - power over them.”

“I am.”

“Then I disagree twice. Take your own example - Sisyphus has strength to push the boulder but lacks the power to stop. Because the Father condemned him to that fate, and the Father is his better.”

Griffon nodded easily. “An accurate summation.”

“The Father’s strength is as distant from a Tyrant’s - even the Tyrant that defied death twice - as a Tyrant’s strength is from a Hero’s. Take what you’ve asserted and apply it to Sisyphus. Do you mean to tell me that if Sisyphus only knew our Father in Raging Heaven, had actionable knowledge of him, that would give the Tyrant power over the god?”

Damon Aetos’ scarlet son tilted his head just a fraction, as if the question confused him.

“Yes. Of course.”

“Irreverent and foolish.” Scythas said, beyond disbelief now. “I wish I could say that sentiment surprised me, but I think I finally begin to understand you.”

“Ho?” Griffon waved thirty pankration hands invitingly, interested.

“You say whatever it is you believe will shock the other party most and commit further to it when called out, taking refuge in the smokescreen of those absurdities whenever you’re presented with a topic that no longer interests you.”

“How cruel,” Selene whispered, roughly loud enough for Sisyphus to hear her in the underworld.

“Very,” was all I said, because I couldn’t say I disagreed.

Griffon raised an eyebrow along with his pneuma, his influence grasping for the hero. Scythas’ influence rose up and sharply smacked the former Young Aristocrat’s aside. My stallion snorted and tossed his head.

“How is it any fault of mine if the truth appears to you a smokescreen?”

“The truth,” Scythas shot back mockingly. “It’s all too easy to say a claim is true when there’s no way to prove it. If only Sisyphus were here, I could tell him the name of God and see for myself what power that gave him over heaven. Alas, we’ll never know.”

In the blood red light of the rosy-fingered dawn, Griffon smiled sharply.

“No need for the Tyrant. Tell me the Father’s name, if you know it. I’ll call him out myself.”

Raging heaven rumbled.

“Hua!” the old Thracian jerked up in his saddle, blinking sleep out of his eyes as he looked up and around. “Rain already?”

“No,” Selene whispered.

I glared up at clear and starry skies. “Just thunder.”

“Well?” Griffon invited the Hero. Scythas stared at him.

“I disagree with both of you,” I decided, drawing all eyes to me.

“And what do you propose?” Griffon asked curiously. “Why else would a Tyrant keep their past a secret, if not to prevent others from gaining power over them?”

“Or following in their footsteps,” Scythas added.

As always, they had made things more convoluted than they needed to be. That was to say, they were Greek.

“Do either of you remember the first time you stood under your own power?” I asked.

Scythas blinked. “Physically? Or…” Aside from the obvious meeting, it was also a fairly common phrase in certain cultures to describe a cultivator’s awakening.

“Both.”

“Of course, then. Every cultivator remembers that,” he said matter of factly. Griffon, meanwhile, had started to chuckle quietly to himself.

“What’s funny?” Selene asked him, curious. He shook his head, golden mane of hair burning blood-orange in the low light.

“I’ve just witnessed a miracle. A Roman having an insightful thought.”

I grabbed a glowing hand of his intent out of the air and folded four of its fingers down. He guffawed.

“What?” Scythas demanded. “Enlighten me, if you’ve already figured it out for yourself.”

“I remember the day my soul awoke and I stood under my own power, that’s true enough,” Griffon explained through a smile. “But I certainly don’t recall the infant memory of physically standing up for the first time. If a man exists that does, I’d be surprised.”

“And?” the Hero pressed, looking to me. “Was that the whole thought?”

“Everyone remembers one of those memories, and everyone has forgotten the other. Both of them are foundational moments in any cultivator's life, though. Both were crucial steps in their development, something their parents would surely brag of in their place. But what about now?”

“Ahh,” Selene breathed, understanding.

“Here and now, would you be proud to brag about the very first moment you didn’t need someone else’s strength to stand up straight? Is that something either of you want to do?” I splayed both hands out invitingly. “I’ll listen if it is.”

“Already did,” Griffin said smugly, content knowing that the memory would be seared into my mind forever because the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god had been there to make it memorable.

“… no,” Scythas admitted. “I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” I asked him. “Those were key moments for you at the time. Are you afraid I’ll use the knowledge against you?”

He grimaced. “No. They’re just not worth mentioning.”

I’d seen a grimace not unlike that one on my great-uncle’s face every time I asked him to tell me a story from his younger days. The same expression every time, and nearly the same answer to follow it up. The only parts that ever changed were the ages cited.

Why should I waste my time bragging about a thing I accomplished at thirty, when Alexander did it at eighteen?

I shrugged. “For a Tyrant, all mortal memories feel something like that.”

We rode in silence for a long while after that.

Eventually, Khabur led us to our vineyard. I’d been skeptical about an old man’s ability to navigate a landscape he hadn’t traversed in years during pitch dark night, but the Thracian sailor had come through in the end. Our horses moseyed slowly through shadowed rows of grape vines, spilling across the landscape as far ahead as the light of Griffon’s virtue allowed for us to see

After an amount of time that felt random but hopefully wasn’t, Scythas raised a silent hand and hopped down from his horse. With one hand he stroked the dark mare’s head, and with the other he pulled a ripe red apple from a fold in his attire and fed it to her one bite at a time

Then, once she had finished eating, the Hero whistled a single high note and a scythe of wind separated cut her head cleanly off her body. The head struck the dirt amidst coiling grape vines, and a moment later the body collapsed bonelessly beside it. Gushing blood pooled in the soil, and the grape vines drank greedily of it.

“As I was saying before,” he said, just barely audible over the screaming of the other horses, “most Tyrants won’t speak of their lives before they entered the Heroic realm. As was the case in most aspects of his life, however, Bakkhos was an exception.”

Scythas held both hands parallel above the earth, palms facing down. Khabur’s mare whinnied and danced away, the sailor having dismounted from her to kneel in the dirt and pray with closed eyes and clasped hands. To my right, Griffon leaned forward on his starlit mare with rapt attention.

To my left, Selene had plugged both of her ears with her fingers and was watching the decapitated horse’s blood seep into the earth with distasteful expectation.

“The kyrios of the Raging Heaven was foreign-born, if you can believe it,” Scythas continued, the Heroic flames behind his hazel eyes rising steadily. “Born on this very soil, raised on one of these very vineyards. He confided in me once, when I was still new to Olympia and the Raging Heaven Cult, that the best winemakers in the world died centuries and millennia before any of us were born.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall glanced at Griffon, and then at the mare’s corpse on the ground.

“Burn it.”

Thirty hands of burning intent gripped the corpse and rendered it to ash and charcoal.

I heard a faint whisper in the dark.

“The best days for drinking are behind us,” Scythas said, imitating the mad Tyrant’s voice and, somehow, invoking something in the earth as he did it. “These days, if you want a good cup you’ll have to dig for it.”

“Praise be,” Khabur whispered, in steady repetition. “Praise be, praise be, praise be.”

“Praise be to the Hero,” Scythas intoned, and the whispers turned to shrieks. My stallion reared up, screaming his own challenge in reply.

Before our eyes, a massive hand like sculpted squid ink rose up from the soil and the vines and closed around the burnt remains of Scythas’ dark mare, dragging it under. The shrieking rose to a crescendo, and then the soil collapsed into the hole left behind by its passage and the eerie nose ceased.

Griffon and I shared a wide eyed look.

Scythas inhaled deeply.

“Chthonic Hero, whom I have long admired,” he spoke gravely, in the same voice as the man that had broken the Tyrants of every greater mystery cult and arrayed them at his feet. He spoke with grave intent. His words carried weight. I felt the pressure in my soul, something like gravita-

“Where can I find a decent cup of wine?”

I stared as a second chthonic hand rose up from the earth.

And pointed.

1.77

The Young Griffon

Our objective in Thracia was clear. It was also nearly worthless.

A golden cup filled with spirit wine. That was all the Gadfly had given us, along with a vague marker on an endless charter of land to find it in. The belligerence in my heart urged me to take him at his most literal word, dip my toe into the vast expanse of Thracia and fill the first golden cup I found with the cheapest spirit wine available. Accounting for the time wasted sailing here and back, we were out a week no matter what - and three months could pass in the blink of an eye if we chose to explore.

The temperance in my treacherous mind urged against it, however, and so the Roman’s proposal won out in the end. I wanted to get these errands over with, but I could all too easily envision a world where we returned to Olympia with insufficient ingredients and were sent back out to do the work properly. And we would have no recourse but to do it.

The Gadfly held the reins in this arrangement. I had come to Olympia to see the Oracle, but more than that I had come to speak to her - and by all accounts, the latter would be impossible without a divine cure. So the Gadfly said, anyway. I was confident that mortal hands could mend the problem, if only Old ‘Zalus could find a physician worth their title. I knew I could cure it without any nectar at all, if I had the time to properly immerse myself in medical study.

If.

As things stood now, though, I had only just started walking the physicians path a few weeks ago and the Olympic Games were in four months. Meaning I had three months to reach the realm of Heroes or else find another way to gain entry as a competitor, else I would be barred entirely. I had ideas, but every one of them would take time to implement. Ruinous time, each and every one.

The Fates had stranded me in a market that only accepted one singular currency, time, and I was a very poor man. As a result, none of my options were appealing.

If I chose to dance to the Gadfly’s tune and run his errands for him, I risked missing my opportunity to compete in the games. I also risked my audience with the Oracle - after all, the Gadfly had only said he should be able to synthesize nectar with his knowledge.

If I chose to race down the physician’s path and mend the Oracle myself, I put myself at odds with Sol. Normally an enticing prospect if anything, but in this case an irritation. The girl would never agree to abandon this quest now that it had been offered to her, And I knew Sol well enough to tell that he wouldn’t abandon her in the pursuit of it without a compelling reason. And I still risked missing my chance to compete, even so.

Socrates had us over a barrel and he knew it. Even if we knew he was being deliberately vague, even if we knew he was parceling out objectives to keep us away from his city, we had little choice but to suffer it and make the best time we could. After all, as Sol had pointed out on the beach, what else were we to do? Ask around? Make the nectar ourselves?

Yes. Obviously. We were going to do exactly that.

We couldn’t just grab the first golden cup we saw and fill it with piss wine, that much was likely true. We also couldn’t wander blindly through the Mediterranean and the lands beyond without any idea what we were searching for, not if we hoped to make good time. Thankfully, we had discovered shortly after Sol and I had reached that conclusion that we wouldn’t have to.

The sea dogs that we had liberated from pirates were an eclectic bunch, put politely. Put frankly, I had discovered on our way to Olympia over a month ago that they were the dregs their slavers couldn’t sell. Not pretty enough for sexual servitude, none of them the correct combination of young and healthy and strong to be bought up as miners or field laborers. And somehow, some way, not a single one of them skilled enough in a trade to catch a merchant’s eye.

It was so tragic that it crossed the line into comedic. They were all worthless. Each one the runt of their litter, the only slave not sold. Good for nothing but rowing.

They were worthless, and because of that they were exactly what we needed.

By good fortune or by providence, ten men from ten wildly different backgrounds had been disdainfully chained together and then dropped into our laps over a month ago. We had ten destinations on the map that the Gadfly had given us. And as it happened, for every location marked by gold there was at least one filthy sea dog that had been there before. Even some, like the Thracian, that had been born and raised in one of those destinations.

Each of those ten men had decided against returning my cousin’s ship as I had advised for various foolish reasons, and had decided to repay their perceived debts to myself and my Roman with their service. They were all too happy to share with us what knowledge they had of the places they had been and the homes from which they had been taken. Best of all, they were willing to do it for free.

They could still lie, of course, in the interest of telling a more exciting story or saving themselves personal embarrassment. I doubted they could fool Sol and I if they did, though. A slave with the acting skills required would have been bought up long ago. I was confident enough in that to make the wager, and so was Sol.

So rather than stumble blindly through each gold-marked nation in search of locals willing to guide us to forbidden knowledge, or otherwise wait for the Gadfly to get around to being useful, we could use our sea dogs. Now, were any of them particularly knowledgeable about the mythos behind divine nectar? No, of course not. Did any of them know about the late Tyrant Bakkhos, whose footsteps we were following? Less than us, if anything at all.

Their past experiences were useful, but only if we knew the proper questions to ask.

Surprisingly, that was where Scythas earned his keep.

§

On the first day, we brought the Thracian.

“Like this, žibùtė,” Khabur told me with an old man’s patience, deftly avoiding the snapping teeth of an ornery mare while he saddled her. He was spry for an old man and handled the horse without fear.

Not that the horses Scythas had secured for us were anything to fear. Giant man eating mares had been the Champion’s labor to overcome when he came to Thracia in the distant golden age, but these beasts were hardly large enough to ride, let alone large enough to warrant iron chains and a bronze manger. I waited and let the old sea dog show me his method before mounting my own, out of courtesy if nothing else.

“There!” Khabur grunted, swinging up onto his mare and swatting her on her hind leg when she bucked half heartedly. “Simple as that! Even a Greek can do it.”

I glanced at the mare provided for me, fidgeting and quick stepping in place. She was a slight thing, taller than Khabur’s but with legs so slender it was a wonder she could support her own weight, To say nothing of mine. Her coat was white beneath the grime, and her mane along with her tail were pitch dark. Pretty enough to look at, I supposed. If not for the look she was giving me.

I reached out with an empty hand to distract her while the other brandished the leather harness, just as Khabur had done. Unfortunately, my horse had been paying attention to his lesson as well. The slender mare disdained my empty hand and took the saddle in her mouth, whipping her head back with the full strength of her frame.

Four pankration fists slammed into her head from every cardinal direction, and the mare collapsed like a lead weight. I sat myself on her naked back and patted her encouragingly.

“Up with you. I have places to be,” I informed the impudent beast of burden. Something like a winnie came wheezing out of the horse’s mouth. She rose, dazed and on unsteady legs.

I looked expectantly to the old Thracian on his stocky mare. The sea dog’s lips were pressed together like I’d forced him to bite into a lemon. His mare seemed a bit nervous.

“Is that how they treat their horses in the Scarlet City?” Scythas asked disdainfully, leading his own horse over by the reins. He’d tacked his horse already, the beast larger abreast than mine with slightly shorter legs. He hopped up onto its back with a Hero’s superhuman grace and sneered at me as if he’d proven a point.

“It isn’t,” Sol said, walking up with his own beast in tow. “He’s just impatient.” Exasperated shouting and Selene‘s delighted laughter drifted out of the stables behind him. Her horse was giving her a fight, it seemed.

“You can’t treat a horse you intend to ride like that,” Khabur said, the old Thracian finally finding the words to express his discomfort. “Especially not a Thracian mare. She’ll hate you til she dies.”

“She can hate me in the underworld if it suits her,” I said easily, gripping a handful of her glossy black mane in lieu of reins. “So long as we understand each other.”

The white mare tossed her head and snorted, shaking the last of her dizziness. She returned to what she’d been doing before I mounted her, dancing in place and casting around for a direction to run. She’d do fine.

Though I could have likely made better time without her. The cost of doing business in Thracia, according to the good Hero.

Vicious Thracian cursing and a young woman’s shriek preceded the final member of our party, a black stallion exploding out of the stables with Selene balancing precariously on its back. Her eyes were wide, but the flames behind them burned merrily and her smile was pure white.

“I told her to avoid that one,” Scythas murmured, trying and failing to be more aggravated than amused.

“Mean lookin’ bastard, he is,” Khabur agreed, stroking his coarse red beard while the stallion bucked and screamed furiously. Selene, for her part, whooped and waved excitedly as they spun in our direction. Two young men sprinted out of the stables with panic writ large across their faces. A third staggered out a beat later, clutching his side and gagging.

“The reins!” one of the stable hands shouted. “Pull the reins!”

Selene did so, heaving back on the rope. She was a slender girl, utterly dwarfed by the horse underneath her, but a Heroine was a Heroine. The stallion’s head snapped back so hard it looked for a moment like it had snapped its neck.

“Not like that-!”

Then he screamed furiously and whipped his body around so hard that Selene was spun clean off his back.

Scythas winced and Khabur hissed sympathetically as she hit the ground and rolled. Her stallion snorted and snapped its teeth in satisfaction, thick slabs of muscle coiling its legs as it braced and shot forward in the opposite direction of the stable.

Sol caught its naked reins as the stallion passed and planted his feet. The horse was as tall as my father, and likely weighed more than Scythas’ and Khabur’s mares combined. It took half a step more before the reins went taut in the Roman’s hand and the whole beast whipped back like the string of a loosed bow. This time, we heard its neck snap.

The stable hands howled in dismay while our own Thracian sea dog buried his face in his hands, unable to stand the grotesque sight of the stallion’s legs spasming and kicking in its death throes. Scythas’ lips moved soundlessly, a silent prayer - whether for the horse’s spirit or his own patience, I couldn’t say.

Sol’s eyes rolled. “Up.”

He kicked the dying horse in its side.

And, with an irritated snort, it stood.

“A faker,” I said, impressed by its sheer gall as the massive beast shook itself off. Evidently no worse for wear. Sol tossed aside its reins and the broken bridle attached - the sound we’d mistaken for the stallion’s neck snapping - and jumped up onto its bare back.

“Take mine,” he told the holy girl as she found her feet. Selene saluted, giggling breathlessly, and stumbled over to the docile mare that Sol had chosen.

“‘Suppose that is how Alikons treat their horses,” Khabur said faintly. Scythas inhaled deep and slow.

“Our transportation is secured,” I reported, swaying with my mare as she trotted in place. Antsy from the spectacle and itching to run. An attitude I could appreciate. I raised an eyebrow at the Hero of the Scything Squall. “Where to now, herdsman?”

It was the Gadfly’s intent to keep us out of civilized society until he saw fit to allow us back in. Without a doubt, he wanted to avoid another Unkindness until at least the games were settled, if not the entire question of succession in the Raging Heaven. And so long as we desired the end result but lacked the means to achieve it ourselves, he knew he could feed us just enough that we wouldn’t starve. A single drop of liquid gold at a time.

But that was assuming we knew nothing about Bakkhos’ heroic deeds. An assumption rightly made - up until the moment Chilon’s scroll and my dear uncle’s story had jogged the memories of every Heroic cultivator in our company.

“Khabur,” Scythas said wearily, in lieu of a straight answer. “Where’s the nearest vineyard?”

“Why?” Sol asked, his fuming stallion snapping at my mare as it drew close. She was unimpressed.

Shielding his eyes with a hand, the Hero of the Scything Squall appraised the setting sun above.

“It’s time we offer our thanks to those below.”

1.76

The Son of Rome

Thracia, otherwise known as the nation with no definite boundaries, was a barbaric land in every sense of the word. Its cultures were unrefined, its peoples were savages, and its treatment even of allies was brutally cruel. My father as well as Aristotle had both told me stories of the Thracian tribes when I was a boy, and the Greek perspective had differed little from the Roman perspective.

Northeast of Macedonia and separated from the Aegean Sea only by a thin line of coastal greek colonies, the greater territories of Thracia all too often spilled off the northern edge of any map that cared to name them - the one Socrates had given us being no exception. One of the most populous nations in the world, one of Gaius’ logisticos had once confided in me that the only thing stopping Thracians from overtaking us all was the Thracians themselves.

The only reason they weren’t a nation to rival all others was the fact that they could hardly be called a nation at all. There had been a kingdom there, once, existing in the years between the Greeks breaking the Persian Empire’s back and the rise of Alexander the Conqueror. Prior to that and since then, what the maps label Thracia has been more than anything a loose collection of tribal societies that the mapmakers couldn’t be bothered to differentiate between.

So when Socrates had marked with gold the portion of the map labeled Thracia, he had essentially pointed a finger vaguely north of the Aegean Sea and told us to begone. For all the marker implied, we could find that golden cup of wine an hour off the coast or at the northern edge of the world.

Thankfully, where the Gadfly had lacked, Scythas had provided.

Though at the moment, he didn’t have quite the right mindset to guide us.

“All this time? She was here all this time?” the Hero of the Scything Squall said in rising disbelief. “How is that possible?” He wasn’t the only one voicing such thoughts. The galley slaves that Griffon and I had freed on our way to Olympia were hollering their own complaints - from what I could discern, they were less aghast at the fact that a cultivator had avoided their notice for three days on a crowded ship, and more at the fact that said cultivator was a woman.

I was no seaman, but even I knew that the only woman a sailor would tolerate on his ship was the one carved from wood at the bow. Alas.

“You did last longer than I thought you would,” I mused, smirking at Selene’s betrayed look. “I was certain you’d crack when you realized the limits of that anonymity.”

The daughter of the Scarlet Oracle - daughter of either Elena or Calliope, unless the current Oracle was a crone predating them - huffed and tossed one of the many ragged elements of her disguise at my face.

“You knew she was here from the start?” Scythas groaned and shook his head, splinters of wood flying from his hair. He’d nearly broken the mast when he slammed the back of his head against it. “Why am I surprised, of course you did-”

“How?” Griffon asked, the neutral tone of his words betrayed by the intensity of his scarlet gaze. He didn’t need to speak to me through his shadow for his true feelings to be conveyed.

How had Selene tricked his senses for three days straight when we had both managed to see through the Gadfly’s disguise in his cave beneath the immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven? And more importantly than that, how had I seen through it when he had not?

“Rhetoric is the art of persuasion,” I answered, addressing both questions as I met his hungry stare. “A man’s rhetoric can be refined or crude, impassioned or dull - those are secondary concerns. The only real measure that matters is whether or not his point is persuasive.”

You may not like it, the raven in my shadow spoke to his when his eyes narrowed, but your discontent won’t change reality.

Not yet, was all he said in turn.

“What does that have to do with this?” Scythas asked, mirroring Griffon’s curiosity without the corresponding belligerence.

“Men are stubborn and irreverent creatures, cultivators even more so,” I said, waving a hand at the bare chested Greek lounging on a throne of rowing benches. He scoffed when Scythas and most of the sailors nodded along to that point. Selene giggled. “At times, depending on the topic and the man being persuaded, no rhetoric will ever be good enough. Other times, the man doing the persuading is his own obstacle.”

I hadn’t ever put it together as a child under his tutelage, nor had I made the connection between my childhood mentor’s lectures and the Gadfly’s ability to walk through a crowded city without drawing a single eye. I hadn’t made the connection largely because what Socrates did was different from what Aristotle did. I had needed a refresher on the latter to connect it to the former, and the story of the Aetos brothers had been exactly that.

“Aristotle used to warn me that a man’s reputation was its own form of rhetoric,” I recalled. “A passive rhetoric that follows you and requires no words - persuasion through past deeds.”

“Why was that a warning?” Scythas asked, puzzled.

“Because men are stubborn and irreverent creatures,” Griffon echoed my words, backed by understanding. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest that he understood it at once. It had taken me years of service at Gaius’ side to fully internalize it, but he had been Damon Aetos’ son his entire life.

“They are.” I nodded. “In Rome, Aristotle was known as the man who knew everything. That was his reputation, and it colored every interaction he had while among Romans. It made those who idolized that reputation more likely to be swayed by his word, no matter what the point of contention was, and it made those who resented that reputation far less likely to hear him in good faith.”

From time to time, and more often the older we get, our past undermines our present. Make no mistake, boy. A sycophant is as troublesome as a censor when you’re searching for the truth.

“Sometimes,” I quoted the man who had mentored me as an irreverent young patrician, “an argument will only work if you’re not the one making it. You can be someone else, or you can be no one at all. All that matters is that you are not yourself.”

“Anonymity,” Selene and Griffon murmured at the same time. One with reverence, the other with disdain.

“What Socrates did when he called us out at the bathhouse was a slightly different application than what Aristotle did,” I explained. “But each one was an application of anonymity.”

“How so?” Scythas asked, having been absent when we were confronted by the mentor of my mentor’s mentor.

“Socrates can be seen and spoken to when he wraps himself in anonymity,” Griffon explained brusquely. “All he does is separate himself from-” he paused, eyes widening slightly.

“From his reputation,” I completed his thought. “You can still see the man and trade discourse with him, but you can’t recognize him for who he is. What Aristotle did was a level further removed from that. You can’t see the man at all - in a crowded agora, you’d hear the voice but never see the face.”

Often times, a voice in the crowd is all that’s needed.

As a young patrician, I had learned early on that I had to be able to recognize which thoughts were my own and which were actually my mentor’s anonymous whispers. As a legionary, I had learned that I needed to keep my eyes open on and off the battlefield - that I had to see. I still hadn’t quite figured out how Aristotle did what he did, but I could spot his work.

Selene had caught up to us just as the Eos was pulling into the dock city back at Olympia. I had seen her when she snuck aboard for our departure, and she had seen that I had seen her. Frozen like a rabbit before a wolf. But when I hadn’t said anything and no one else had reacted, the sunkissed Heroine had relaxed. She spent the days that followed amusing herself with the coastal views and Sorea, the eagle’s eyes having picked her out immediately as well.

Speaking had been out of the question, because a voice without a visible source was far less easy to ignore on a ship like the Eos than it was in a crowded agora. We had communicated periodically through writing, fake letters that were really just extended conversations mixed in with the actual messages I'd spent the trip thus far drafting.

“Who taught you how to do that?” Griffon demanded.

“And why are you here at all?” Scythas asked, dread darkening his expression as he belatedly realized exactly who it was that had snuck aboard our ship. “The Gadfly told you not to come.”

It was true. Down in the subterranean courtyard of the Raging Heaven’s late kyrios, the Gadfly had smacked Selene down almost before she finished agreeing to the quest on our behalf. Their furious arguing had followed Griffon, Jason, Scythas and I all the way up the tunneled steps. Yet here she was.

I inclined my head, ceding the explanation to the girl herself.

“In reverse order!” Selene exclaimed cheerfully, thirteen sets of eyes following her finger as it shot up. “Socrates is not my father or my mentor. I listen to him only when it suits me, and his disapproval means less to me than propriety does to the shirtless vagabond over there.”

Her finger swiveled to point at the vagabond in question. Griffon rolled his eyes, but I saw the way his lips twitched at the corners.

A second finger was raised. “I have no idea how these rags work, only that they do. After the great philosopher left me to sulk, he extracted a promise from each of the Oracles present to keep me in their sights, apparently assuming their personal integrity would outweigh their disdain for him.”

“Unwise,” Griffon mused.

“So then I stole these clothes from the kyrios’ quarters and snuck out anyway!”

“In defiance of all common sense,” I added wryly. The sunkissed Heroine beamed.

Scythas’ mouth opened and then after a long moment closed.

“Do you realize the immensity of the problems your absence will cause?” Griffon asked, and the Hero of the Scything Squall looked to him in surprise. Griffon leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and stared intently at the Heroine. “Do you have any idea at all what you are inviting with this petty defiance?”

Selene met him glare for glare. Scarlet to Scarlet. “I do.”

“And you don’t care?”

“Not enough to stay. Not when there’s hope for my mother again. Some things are worth risking.”

Griffon‘s eyes narrowed. Searching. Reaching.

Finding.

“So long as you know.” The former Young Aristocrat sat back in his throne and crossed his arms, satisfied.

“So long as she knows,” Scythas echoed in bleak disbelief. “If her father finds out who she snuck away with, you know what he’ll do.”

Griffon lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug.

I put it into words.

“We know what he will try.”

The scarlet sail of the Eos billowed as if filled by gale winds, though the breeze on our skin did not for a moment shift. Mortal sailors exclaimed in mingled awe and fear at the sudden heat rising up from beneath their feet, along with the scent of burning ash wood and rosy light.

Beneath the planks of the deck, evoked by defiance of Burning Dusk, the legacy of four brothers shone in the shape of an eagle.

1.75

The Young Griffon

As a boy first learning how to sail beneath my father’s watchful eye, the Eos had seemed to me a daunting vessel. She was large for what she was. Not a trireme, not even a true war galley, but larger than any trade ship. My father had designed her in the Phoenician style - rather than the four-to-one ratio of a merchant vessel, or the eight-to-one ratio of a war galley, she was six-length to one-width. Too small to be a fighter, yet too large for one boy alone to comfortably manage her. Though, of course, I had in the end.

When the prodigal son of the late Anargyros Aetos first received my father’s blessing to venture out into the wider world, setting sail for greater shores, the Eos had seemed to me a lonely vessel. Nikolas, a senior Philosopher at the time, had led her over the horizon with the deft capability he showed in all things.

But even so, there had been something bleak to the sight. The Aetos family watched from the docks - my father and his brothers and their wives, all of my cousins and I, all of us waiting for the one and only son of the family’s broken pillar to vanish into the horizon. To sail into the rosy dawn as it reared up in the east, one young man captaining alone a ship that had been built by four to serve eight.

Nikolas Aetos left the Rosy Dawn, and with him he took the same spark that Anargyros Aetos had taken with him in his passing. My father sent him off with rare fondness. Weighed him down with trinkets and coins and told him never to return until he had six companions and a wife worth showing off to his family. He had hugged Nikolas tightly, and when my cousin drew me into the embrace as well it felt like I was the nephew instead of the son.

The experience drove Lydia and Heron to tears, diverted Castor from his chosen path and left Rena despondent. It woke Myron’s sleeping soul. My aunts and uncles saw him off with fierce encouragement and fond sorrow. They were proud of what he was and what they knew he would become, but even a temporary loss was a tragedy in its moment. For the brothers of the late Anargyros and for their wives, parting was bittersweet.

For me, it had only been bitter.

Half a decade passed before I saw the Eos again. I languished in those years. I paced up and down the eastern mountain range in search of greater purpose and found nothing. I foraged through the Scarlet City’s citizens and her mystikos in search of passion and found no one. I hunted within myself for principle unmarred by apathy, and found every one of them was hollow.

The day my cousin came home, I saw that the Eos had changed again. She had been a tragedy on breaking waves the day that Nikolas took her out. Five years later, she returned as my deliverance.

I had been all but certain I’d never see her again after brightening Olympia’s shores, confident that it was our tale together concluded. I was wrong.

“Tell it to us again, žibùtė,” Khabur, the old Thracian who knew over a hundred sea shanties, urged me while we skimmed the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. “Tell us about the lightning!”

A chorus of cheers went up from the other nine sea dogs on deck, galley slaves that Sol and I had liberated from pirates the day we escaped the Rosy Dawn. The weeks since then had been kind to them. Each of them had gained much needed weight and the heavy lines of exhaustion had begun to smooth from their faces. Some marks were permanent, but those did nothing to dampen their high spirits.

“Again?” I raised an eyebrow, lounging with one leg crossed over the other and my right cheek propped up by a fist. My throne of rowing benches differed slightly from how I’d left it, but to the crew’s credit they had reassembled it as best they could without being prompted. “A story is never as good the second time you hear it, you know. Why ruin it with repetition?”

Groans and protestations were my response. I chuckled and obliged them. They had been working themselves to the bone the last few days, after all, hardly stopping to sleep and taking food and drink only while they rowed. Sol had told them to pace themselves and I had not disagreed, but there was a determination in each of those sea dogs that would not be stifled.

I supposed the least I could do was entertain them. And if telling the same story twice meant dampening its luster, then I’d simply tell a different one. The same event, but a different portion of it.

“The Raging Heaven Cult is an institution devoted to man’s hubris,” I began. “They decorate their bath houses with scenes of ruinous debauchery and fill their holy places with relics and idols of history’s greatest fools. As it turns out, their initiation rites are no different.

“Last time I told you of the Oracles that I convened with during my brief holiday in the immortal storm crown. This time, how would you dogs like to hear about the suffering memorials I encountered in my ascent - the cast down giants and disgraced kings punished personally by our own faceless divinity?”

The sailors whooped and hollered in reply.

I regaled them with stories of Sisyphus, twice risen king, of Porphyrion, Tyrant giant, as well as the rest of the tribulation statues that I had gathered my twenty iron blades from. Disgraced Minos and defiled Pasiphae, Aktaion the voyeur, the starving Tyrant Erysichthon, and of course Ixion on his burning wheel. The sailors listened hungrily, if nothing else wise enough to know that this was knowledge any Civic cultivator would kill for. Knowledge of the Raging Heaven’s rites.

“You shouldn’t be telling them this,” Scythas muttered, leaning against the ship’s mast and looking out at the distant coast off our port side. We’d made good time to Thracia thus far. The sea dogs were giving it their best, and the hands of my pneuma were pulling right alongside them.

“I heard you the last time,” I acknowledged.

“I’m serious. This, and that memory you smacked our faces with down in Bakkhos’ estate. You may not care, but they will when they let slip the stories you’ve told them in the wrong company, and a cultivator tears them to pieces for their knowledge. Knowledge they shouldn’t have.”

I considered that. Cast of glance over the sea dogs, suddenly a bit more somber than before.

“Show of hands,” I said, raising my own demonstratively. “Who here knows how to keep their mouth shut?” All ten of the former slaves raised a hand from their oars.

“Put your hand down,” Sol ordered me from his place at the front of the ship. I smirked and offered him a sacred family gesture.

“Knowing how and choosing to are entirely separate questions,” I said. To Scythas, I added, “and what a man does with a gift he is given has nothing to do with the giver. My experiences are mine and no one else’s - I am free to share them, as these sea dogs are free to hear them.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Scythas disagreed, scowling at distant Thracia. “Every mystiko swears the same oath the day they’re inducted - a vow of secrecy against outsiders. How can those experiences be yours to share when experiencing them at all was contingent on keeping your mouth shut?”

“I never swore any such oath.”

Scythas spat on the deck my father’s hands had built.

“Then enlighten this lowly sophist. How did you experience these things at all?” ‘Or did you?’ went unsaid.

“You found me after the Gadfly split us up,” Sol explained for my benefit, though he didn’t look up from the letter he was writing. “Socrates dragged me down the mountain to Bakkhos’ estate alone, but before that Griffon and I confronted him together. For his cheek, Socrates beat him bloody and tossed him up into the storm crown.”

Scythas blinked, visibly processing that. I had specified for the sailors that I was alone when describing my audience with the Oracles, but I had not given them the context leading up to my plunge into baptismal lightning. Scythas alone had not been present at Elissa’s home when I came down the mountain, nor had he been at the bathhouse when Socrates first confronted us.

Why are you only just now telling him this? the raven in my shadow asked the raven in Sol’s curiously, the two connected by the dark silhouette cast by the Eos’ sail.

I had other things on my mind.

Liar.

Sol quietly sighed, glancing up from his writing just long enough to pin me with a flat stare across the deck. I had other things on my mind, such as the Tyrant Aleuas that sent him to assassinate me in the first place.

Ho? Now there was an interesting revelation. You fought Scythas and you didn’t tell me? I think I might spit blood.

It didn’t come to that. Largely because he thought I was a greater man than I actually am. He was willing to join me over Aleuas because he thought I was equally capable. If I had told him in that moment that Socrates had just recently wiped the floor with me and my ‘student’ both, that illusion would have been shattered.

The raven in my shadow laughed. The noise it produced was odd, a deep and gurgling caw. I wouldn’t be so sure.

In the wake of Chilon’s story, Sol had decided to do the righteous thing for once and told the truth to our companions. As far as he was concerned, his captain's speech had finally clarified the matter of his strength for the six Heroic cultivators that had been wondering since meeting us. He didn’t mind revealing what he perceived as weakness now because he assumed that Scythas had been stripped of all his delusions.

I am no Tyrant, Sol had so furiously declared. I refuse to be associated in such a way with your elders.

Sol had been so caught up in his own wrath at the Raging Heaven’s injustice that he had failed to notice the implication of his wording, just as he had failed to properly answer Kyno when the Heroic Huntsman asked him what realm he occupied within the Roman eight.

I will tear your free cities apart, drink whatever divine elixir your gods fill their cups with, and topple all of your Tyrants if that is what it takes to gain the strength that I need. He had promised a room full of Heroes and Heroines this. Promised that he would destroy their homes, steal bread from the mouths of their gods, and cast down the pillars of their holy institutions. He had promised them ruin with that storm in his eyes, and dared them all to do something about it.

And they hadn’t.

Sol thought his Heroic three had chosen to stick with him after that for the sake of camaraderie, born of mutually bleak circumstances - and that might have even been part of it. But looking back on it days later, I suspected it was far from the deciding factor.

Fortunately for my idiot Roman brother, the weakness he now felt comfortable exposing was hardly a weakness at all so far as Scythas was concerned. The Gadfly had beaten us black and blue, but that was to be expected. A Tyrant in his domain was nearly a god, but as far as our companions were concerned, the Tyrant Solus had left his domain behind when he came to Olympia.

A Tyrant was still a Tyrant whether or not you found him on his throne, of course. But the Gadfly was the Gadfly just as well.

“If that’s true,” Scythas finally, reluctantly, spoke, “then I suppose telling ten mortal men secrets that the Raging Heaven would kill them for knowing is only cruelly reckless, rather than cruelly reckless and a violation of oaths.”

I nodded graciously.

“However.” The Hero of the Scything Squall abruptly turned his head and leveled a finger at my face. “That doesn’t excuse the oath you broke when you assaulted us down in that courtyard. You may not have betrayed the Raging Heaven, but you did betray the Rosy Dawn.”

My eyes rolled. “I told you once already. I never swore such an oath.”

“And I suppose the Rosy Dawn’s mystery was forced upon you just like the Raging Heaven’s was?”

“You saw it for yourself,” I said, annoyed now. I had inundated all of them with my memory of first meeting the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. In that moment my reality had become theirs and they had experienced it as I had experienced it, a three year old cradled in his father’s arm.

What sort of oath did he think a three year old could swear themselves to?

They can’t remember what you showed us, Sol’s raven informed mine. Not that vividly

Are you calling my rhetoric crude?

No. Though it is.

Scythas frowned. “Solus. Is he telling the truth?”

“He is.”

The frown deepened. “How? Under what circumstances?”

“You’d have to ask Damon Aetos,” Sol said simply, rolling up his completed message and binding it before starting on another. Scythas grimaced, but didn’t press further.

Why wouldn’t they remember that memory, when I still recall yours of the Conqueror’s pearl city like I was there myself? My shadow demanded while my mind raced. I had recreated Chilon’s rhetoric perfectly, I knew that like I knew the sun rose each day. The fault was theirs, or else I had overlooked something. But what?

When our rites ended and we emerged from the eastern mountain range, there was a tear in my chiton that hadn’t been there before. I assume it caught on something jagged while we were down there.

You assume?

I assume. Because I don’t remember anything of that night except for the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god and your father looming over it. For all that I remember, you could have torn it. I forgot everything of myself in that moment. I think the only reason I can remember what you showed us is that I’d already seen the corpse once before.

Scythas is an initiate of the Howling Wind Cult. He witnessed greater mystery long before he met us.

Maybe he did, Sol’s raven croaked. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he did. Maybe resistance to one has nothing to do with resistance to another.

A thought that was as interesting as it was irritating. I grunted, banishing it from my mind for the moment.

“These men are free,” I decided, encompassing all ten of the sea dogs that Sol and I had liberated. Each of them nodded and voiced vehement agreement in ten different tongues. “If they choose to hang themselves with what I’ve offered them, that is their prerogative. But I suppose if it bothers you that much, I can stop handing them more rope.”

“Thank you.” The Hero’s tone was exasperated, but the words were genuine.

“It might even be for the best,” I mused. “I can’t say their judgement is sound.”

“žibùtė!” Khubar the Thracian protested, along with a few others. I flicked the old man’s temple with a pankration hand, making him yelp.

“I told you ugly dogs that the Scarlet City would reward you handsomely for returning this ship. Yet here I find you over a month later, just as ugly and nearly as poor as you were before. The Hero raises a fair point, the longer that I think about it. How can I trust you to act in your own best interests now when you didn’t before?”

“It wasn’t that simple!”

“We owe you a debt-”

“What would we do if they took us for thieves?”

“We’re all equally far from home-”

Amidst the deluge of excuses, I tilted my head and looked curiously to the rear of the ship.

“And why did you choose to stay?” I asked the redheaded pirate boy currently scrubbing the deck. The crew hadn’t kept him against his will, I’d made sure of that as soon as I saw him on board. They had him doing the worst sort of grunt work, but they had assured Sol and I up and down that it was his choice to do it. The boy hadn’t disagreed.

The former pirate looked up from his work, scowled and shot me an ugly look. “Where else was I supposed to go?”

“The bottom of the sea,” I suggested.

“Don’t bully the child,” Sol called.

“He’s not a child,” I called back. “He’s a bastard.”

“As if you were any better then,” he said, rolling up and sealing another message before tossing it into the air. Perched on the Eos’ figurehead, Sorea snapped it up and swallowed it down.

“As if you’re any better now,” Selene added lightly, pulling a translucent shawl from her head and abruptly existing beside Sol. My mind went curiously blank. Scythas flinched back and slammed his head against the mast. Some of the sea dogs dropped their oars, others cursed, and one screamed shrilly.

“… is there something on my face?” The daughter of the Oracle whispered loudly to the only man on the ship not surprised to see her there. Sol snorted.

1.74 [Athis]

Athis

The Caged Dove

Life in the Rosy Dawn Cult was miserable.

Athis knew it was an ungrateful sorrow. From the very beginning, her prospects had been hopelessly bleak as a slave. That she had survived a year and then half a year again without any scars to show for it was miraculous enough already. When an initiate of a greater mystery cult considered even the natural born citizens of their city to be a lesser existence, it went without saying that their slaves were worth about as much to them as a loyal dog. Sometimes less. The relative safety she had enjoyed from the whimsical cruelties of cultivators within the cult thus far was nothing short of a divine blessing.

Yet lately every day seemed dimmer than the last. It felt to Athis like the sun rose later every day, and each day earlier it fell. Pervicas had assured her that that was impossible the one time she had spoken of it, promised her that winter was behind them rather than up ahead. Somehow, Athis didn’t believe her.

Her duties came easier to her now. The Rosy Dawn Cult was an institution built upon natural mystery, but it was still an institution - and thus cyclical in its ways. Athis had experienced the various holidays and traditions that the cult observed in her first year as a slave, and the work was much the same as she entered her second year. It was something they whispered like a prayer on the truly bad nights, when one of the new additions was sobbing too loudly for the rest of them to sleep in their shared quarters.

It will pass. Some chores were universal - laundering clothes, preparing meals, gathering water.

It will get easier. Others sprang up around holy days - the planting of lettuce and fennel seeds for the Adonia, the brewing of tonics for young men participating in the Heraclaea, the decoration of doors with laurel and olive branches bound by wool for the Pyanopsia, and on and on. All of them pleasant enough but for the Thargelia.

Athis despised the Thargelia.

The first time is the worst, their seniors within the female slave class would promise, grave as any priestess. The first year, the first punishment, the first night in a mystiko’s bed. Nothing hurts quite as bad the second time.

All things pass. Even this.

They all offered that prayer up to heaven every morning when they woke and every night before they slept. Athis was beginning to wonder if anyone would ever listen.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

Athis crept silently around the perimeter of the training in progress, collecting discarded piles of scarlet and white silks as she went. Pervicas was stuck in the kitchens for the afternoon, but Athis was still far from alone in her work. Working women followed behind her, laying down clean cult attire to replace what had been discarded. Others collected empty jugs and replaced them with full containers of clear water or diluted spirit wine.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

In the center of an enclosed courtyard accessible only by the women and girls of the Rosy Dawn Cult, the Young Miss Lydia Aetos was conducting martial practice with her junior sisters.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

The young women of the Rosy Dawn stood in orderly ranks, eight to a row and eight columns deep. Each of them carried a spear, each one unique to the initiate holding it. Some were plain by a cultivator’s standards, competently made but otherwise unadorned. Others were more art than armament -beautifully carved poles decorated with paint, some tied with ribbons and others topped by exotics spearheads. And others still were notched and weathered, distinguished by their visible use.

In the pre-training chatter and over the course of all of her shifts in this courtyard, Athis had overheard the stories behind most of those spears. The ones that had seen use were heirlooms, treasured relics passed down from the mothers and grandmothers that came before them. The flashier spears were nearly all tokens of favor, either from suitors within the cult or wealthy citizens down in the valley city. The unadorned weapons were the product of first generation initiates, a final gift from their proud families or one of their first purchases as cultivators of virtue.

As with everything else, the equipment an initiate brought with them was as much a declaration of their value as what they did with it. The order in which they formed their ranks reflected this. First generation to the rear, martial heirs and favored daughters to the front.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

Lydia Aetos stood apart from the eight by eight formation, facing them and calling out the pace. Pivot, and each girl spun to face her right side. Brace, and she set her feet, calves and thighs tensing. Thrust, and every young woman in attendance jabbed her spear forward, shouting in perfect unison. The next pivot brought them back to center, and the one after that took them left. Then back to center again.

It was one of many martial drills, and no less taxing for its simplicity. The mystikos in attendance were all dripping sweat by this point, their pale skin shimmering like they’d oiled it. In the privacy of the courtyard they trained as their male counterparts did, entirely naked. Those carrying greater burdens followed the Young Miss’ example and bound their chests with strips of linen, but nothing more than that was worn.

Athis had needed a few sessions to acclimate herself to the view. She didn’t know much about cultivating virtue, but the term refinement was all too apt as a description of the process. In her experience, even the least attractive cultivator in a courtyard full of them was a sight worth admiring.

Pervicas had teased her relentlessly that first afternoon, pinched her flushed cheeks and asked if she should be worried that the bonded girls all shared a bath. But she had understood. They all had. None of them had been untouched by awe the first time they laid eyes on an initiate of greater mystery, exposed in all their glory. Well, none of them but-

“Quickly now,” an older girl whispered in her ear. Athis sighed shakily and moved on to the next discarded pile.

None of them but Solus.

Athis and her fellow slaves moved on to the adjoining baths once clothing and refreshment had been properly laid out in the courtyard. Pots of olive oil were placed around the rims of the steaming pools, and bonded women paced around the edges tossing fragrances into the pools from reed baskets. Petals of iris, cistus, and rose, along with cinnamon and mint leaves, all floated atop the water in dizzying quantities. Small, personal containers of perfume were set aside as well, property of those among the initiates that could afford to have them distilled.

When the baths were ready there was nothing to do but wait for them to come. They took up their scraping tools and made idle conversation, enjoying a short break in a fragrant setting.

Athis sat with her knees tucked to her chest and gripped her strigil with both hands, silently staring at her reflection in the pool. She did not offer her own input to the conversations going on around her, and without Pervicas there to force the issue, the other slaves left her to herself. It wasn’t cruelty or lack of care. They could simply tell she didn’t want to talk.

A few of the more reckless women among them dared to run their hands through the hot and fragrant waters, dabbing it on their faces and necks. A slave’s perfume, they called it. Of course, that was all they dared to do. None of them were mad enough to dip their feet in-

Ah. Even in this place, she couldn’t escape thoughts of him.

The young marble beauties of the Rosy Dawn finished up their martial training soon enough, quenching their immediate thirst with the jugs left out in the courtyard before making their way to the baths. Exhausted, but in high spirits, their laughter and playful arguments soon filled the bathhouse.

Athis waited with her head down for an initiate to present themselves for cleansing. When one finally did, marble smooth calves and deceptively delicate feet entering her vision, she looked up and her breath caught.

Lydia Aetos stared piercingly down at her.

“Well?”

The strigil was a curved blade without any sharp edges, a tool for scraping away oil and grime from the body. Athis dragged it up and down the Young Miss’ body, cleansing her of sweat with every pass. Despite having just finished a martial session that had lasted the entire afternoon, her breath was steady and her eyes were clear. Neither of them spoke until the Young Miss turned and presented her back for scraping.

“Your name is Athis.”

The strigil faltered in its path. If it had possessed an edge, she would have drawn the Young Miss’ blood.

“It is, honored miss.” They were the first words she had spoken all day.

“You’ve been here for over a year now,” Lydia Aetos observed, lifting both arms and clasping her hands above her head so that Athis could reach her underarms and sides. “Recently, you’ve spent all of your time in the portions of the estates reserved for women.”

Had she asked around for that information, or had she taken note of Athis herself? She wasn’t sure which possibility unsettled her more.

“Yes,” she whispered.

The duties of a slave were ubiquitous regardless of gender. There were some things only a bonded woman would be expected to do, as was the case for a bonded man, but the majority of chores simply had to be done. It was common sense that every female slave would sequester themselves in feminine spaces if she could. Although there were predators among the marble beauties of the Rosy Dawn, they existed in far lesser numbers than the men of the cult. But there just wasn’t enough work of that kind to go around.

That Athis had not seen a man except from a distance in over a month was no coincidence. No one had that kind of luck. She was being shielded in the only way that her senior sisters could shield her. By giving her the small slivers of sanctuary that they all cherished.

It was a consideration that she did not deserve, and a guilt that festered every day that she selfishly accepted their kindness anyway.

“What has your experience been here?” the Young Miss asked, shifting her stance so Athis could scrape the sweat from her inner thighs.

“I cannot complain, miss.” More than anything, those words were true.

“No. I suppose you can’t.” Lydia Aetos stepped lightly to the edge of the heated pool, smiling briefly when a few of her junior sisters splashed water her way and dared her to jump in. She sat instead. Her feet kicked gently in the fragrance bathwater while she unwound her blonde hair from its tight braids.

Athis quietly wished her an enjoyable bath and hurried away, to safety from piercing blue eyes and pointed conversation-

“Stop.”

What else could she do?

“Sit with me,” the Young Miss commanded, and the caged dove obeyed. Athis tucked her legs underneath her and gripped her strigil as hard as she could so her hands wouldn’t shake.

“You’re afraid of me. Why?” Before Athis could even begin to think of a proper answer, she continued, “Have I ever been cruel to the women of this cult? Any of them, shackled or free?”

“No, Miss.” Not that she had heard of, at any rate. If anything, the aristocratic children of the Rosy Dawn Cult - the young pillars as the mystikos called them - were uncommonly kind for their status. Casual cruelty was an expectation as much as a fear the higher up ladder you went, yet the Aetos children were rarely more than indifferent to the servants on their mountain range.

The greatest of them, the Hero Nikolas Aetos, was kind by any standard - the older servants among them said he had always been that way. Though with wandering eyes and flushed faces several had confessed that the Hero had certainly changed in other ways since he first left the Rosy Dawn. The youngest, Myron Aetos, was as considerate as a child his age could be and prone to endearing imitations of the people he admired. Castor Aetos was easily distracted and at times a ruinous flirt, but never vindictive. Rena Aetos was sweeter than honey and generally subdued, though a few of the senior serving girls were wary of her for reasons they wouldn’t disclose. Even Heron Aetos, for all his proclivities and his harsh tongue, had only ever tried to strike a slave once as far as anyone knew.

And it hadn’t ended well for him.

Lydia Aetos was no different from her siblings and cousins in that regard. She was distant, even at times to her own junior sisters, but Athis had never heard of her doing anything untoward to a slave - especially a woman. None among them were prone to excessive cruelty, not even the Young Aristocrat-

Athis clenched her eyes shut.

The former Young Aristocrat.

“Then tell me, why do you look like you’re about to be struck down?” The Young Miss asked of her, sliding slowly into the pool until the steaming waters were up to her neck. “I have no reason to hate you.”

“Not me, no.” The words came, and from the corners of her eyes Athis saw eavesdropping servants seize up in alarm. Urging her to shut her mouth with silent looks.

“The Roman.”

She supposed it was too late now.

“Sol-”

“Don’t,” Lydia Aetos snapped, and the only mystikos that didn’t look their way were the ones that had already been pretending not to listen. Athis knew, deep in her bones, that she would be tempting the Fates if she finished the word on her lips.

“Solus,” she said, meeting Lydia Aetos’ wrathful stare. “His name is Solus.”

It was the smallest possible defiance she could have offered. It was all a caged dove could do.

For a long, terrifying moment, Athis awaited death. She had no cultivator sense like Solus and some of the other slaves in iron chains had described. She had no way of knowing if or when the Young Miss would strike her. All she knew was that if it happened, she would have no chance of stopping it. Lydia Aetos glared at her for her cheek, and all she could do was stare right back.

“You love him,” Lydia finally said, her voice deathly soft. “As I love him.”

Athis knew that the first and second ‘him’ were not the same person. Even the lowest servants in the Rosy Dawn Cult knew the story of what had taken place the night of Nikolas Aetos’ wedding.

“I don’t,” she said anyway. Shook her head and pressed the dull edge of her scraping tool against her thighs.

“Liar,” Lydia Aetos condemned her. In all her life, Athis had only suffered scorn of such intensity a few times. And of those few painful memories, this one hurt the worst by far. Because it was earned.

“I don’t,” Athis insisted again, even so. To her quiet horror, she heard the promise of tears in her voice. “E-even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. He’s gone now.”

“No.” The Young Miss shook her head once. “He was never here to begin with.” A different ‘he’ again. Whatever it was the other girls felt in her pneuma or heard in her voice, even the most brazen of her junior sisters turned their heads away. Offering what privacy they could.

“What do you mean?” Athis asked, though she knew she didn’t want to know.

Lydia Aetos reached up and pressed a single finger to Athis’ chest, directly over her heart.

“His heart was somewhere else from the very start,” she said. “There’s no capturing what wasn’t present in the first place. You never had a chance, and you never will for as long as you live here. Because you had the misfortune of falling in love with a great man, and great men follow their hearts unto death.”

Athis blinked rapidly, the bathhouse steam obscuring her vision.

“Tell me that I’m wrong.”

“No,” she choked out. “You’re not.”

“And are you content with that?” Lio Aetos’ disgraced fiancé asked her quietly. For the first time in over a month, maybe in all her life, Athis admitted to herself the truth.

“No.”

She wasn’t.

A chorus of gasps and exclamations flooded the bathhouse, along with a sensation that was like dozens of breezes of differing intensity brushing across the surface of her skin and deeper at the same time. Athis inhaled a shuddering breath while tears crept down her cheeks, and it filled her lungs to the point she thought they’d burst.

Lydia Aetos stood from the bath and started walking, beckoning her to follow.

“Good. Neither am I.”

1.73

The Son of Rome

We moved with purpose through the dock city. It was a good day for sailing, as far as I could tell - though admittedly I was far from an expert. The abundance of blue-backed tuna, mackerel, and vibrant dorado on display spoke to good fishing if nothing else. I even spotted a few mongers a bit further down the beach hauling swordfish as large as their torsos. The sight alone was enough to provoke my hunger, evoking vivid memories of the roasted filets Griffon had served at the Kronia.

I debated my next impulse within myself for a moment, but hunger won out in the end. Selene had done her best to smuggle me a few things here and there while I was in the Gadfly’s tender care, minding my health when my mentor would not. There was no substitute for fresh meat, though.

“How much for that one?” I demanded of the next fishmonger that tried to pass me with his haul. He hesitated, glancing around to see if I was talking to anyone else.

“Try a civilized tongue,” Griffon suggested.

The fishmonger fidgeting in front of me could have been from any of the free city-states, as far as I knew, or he could have been from somewhere else entirely. His features were squat and unassuming, just the wrong side of ugly, and his skin was wrinkled and leather-tanned by the nature of his work. He didn’t look any younger than thirty, but his soul was still dormant.

The shard of nameless stone from Babylon had left its mark on me in a vague and profound way. I had no way of knowing what Greek dialect or other far-flung tongue he spoke, yet when I called upon the memory of reading the foundational myths off that shard, my pneuma sprang forth from the back of my throat and coated my tongue.

“How much for the swordfish?” I asked the monger again, the words Latin and every other language at once. The monger blinked and held up his catch.

“As is, sir?”

My hunger reared up.

“From your hands to mine.”

The monger gave Griffon and I a once over, lingering on the battered bronze breastplate Socrates had lent me, as well as Griffon‘s sheathed sword and cult attire. He seemed to come to a decision within himself, shoulder slumping just slightly, and rattled off a nonsense sum of a currency I only vaguely recognized.

“I have no money,” I said flatly. The monger swallowed down his first response to that, casting around for an ally in the seaside markets and finding none that would meet his eyes.

“Don’t have much either, myself. Pardon me for saying it, but I’ve got a family to feed-”

“I’ll work for it.”

Griffon snorted. The monger regarded me with polite disbelief, strained to the limits of courtesy. It was an expression I had seen on more than one centurion’s face in my early days as a tribune.

“You’ll work for it,” he repeated, squinting as if the sun’s glare might have distorted his view of me. “Ain’t you a cultivator?”

“Solus!” Scythas called again, close enough now for even the mongers to see the Heroic flames burning behind his eyes.

“You’re with the Hero?” he asked, aghast.

“The Hero is with us,” Griffon corrected him lightly. The monger inhaled a shaking breath.

“Right. Alright. Then, if it pleases the wise men, I’ll trade for a word of advice.”

My eyebrows drew down. “You’ll what?”

“The monger wants to hear a thinking man’s opinion,” Griffon explained for my benefit. “Fortunately, it seems he’s willing to settle for yours instead.”

“I offered to work for it,” I clarified, ignoring my Greek companion now that he was back to himself. “I’m quick on my feet and strong enough. Point me to a task and I’ll see it done.”

“I didn’t take you for a haggler,” Griffon mused. I gave him an ugly look.

“I’m just telling him to take his money’s worth.”

“Hn. You don’t seem to understand, so I’ll enlighten you,” the former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn said, throwing his arm across my shoulders. “The monger is trying to get his money’s worth out of you. A Greek philosopher’s word is worth more than any sailor’s labor. It isn’t unheard of for even a small morsel of wisdom to awaken a man to his place in the world, depending on the question asked and how well the philosopher articulates his answer.”

Awaken a man to his place in the world. There was only one thing that could mean in this context - the birth of a cultivator. But that hardly made any sense at all.

“That’s all it takes?”

“At times,” Griffon confirmed.

“But that’s so…” I struggled to find a word that wasn’t disparaging. “Soft.” I failed.

Griffon snickered. Mottled color darkened the monger’s face, flushing at the curious looks his fellow sailors were sending his way.

“I suppose where you come from the journey begins upon enlistment?” He waited for me to snap something back, and when I didn’t he groaned. “Oh, you can’t be serious-”

“Ask your question and give me my fish,” I told the weathered fishmonger. The man visibly gathered his courage, set his shoulders, and looked me in my eyes.

Griffon may have spent his life sparring with words as often as with fists, but I had not. If I had been a better student, perhaps I would have picked up Aristotle‘s easy rhetoric or Gaius’ stirring diction. But I was not, and I had not. Labor I could do. But advice of this kind was beyond me. He would be disappointed, of that I was all but certain.

“I’ve lost the clothes off my back five times since I joined Fat Nelp’s crew,” he said in a rush, flopping the swordfish tail at a group of similarly grimy sailors loitering by a beached fishing skiff and pretending not to listen in. “Those whoresons keep thrashing me at dice and telling me to put my wife on the table when I run out of coin. How do I beat them?”

“I take back what I said before,” Griffon said incredulously. “A scholar of profound mystery stands before you, and you’re asking for tips on dice? Do you have any idea-”

I held up a silencing hand, regarding the fishmonger seriously.

“Listen to me closely.”

[S]—————————[S]

“You have a problem.”

“Several,” I agreed. The swordfish wasn’t the largest I had ever seen caught, but it was fresh and the taste of it was sweet enough to remind me why even gods above hunger still ate at times.

“If you were half as passionate about the refinement of your soul as you are about gambling, the Fates wouldn’t stand a chance against you.”

I sank my teeth into swordfish well-earned and savored its flavor. Seabirds hopped and fluttered around in our wake, snapping up the undesirable scales and offal as I tossed them aside. I stepped lightly - objectively, the bone dice I had given the fishmonger to punctuate my lecture didn’t weigh enough to really notice their absence. But the spirit was another matter entirely. I felt nearly naked without them.

“I could have saved myself days and weeks of effort back then,” Griffon lamented. “If I had only known a handful of carved bone was all it took, I could have made this whole journey a wager and played you in a game for it.”

“You could have.” I pried a thin bone out from between my teeth with my tongue and spat it out into the sea. “But you would have lost every time.”

“I never lose the same game twice.”

“You’ve never played me twice.”

The air between us was tense with future promise when we made it to our Heroic companion and the captain of the vessel he had acquired for us.

“Finally.” Scythas took silent note of the bloodied knuckles of my left hand and Griffon's split lip, satisfaction in his eyes’ golden coals. I supposed that as he saw it, I had sent him off alone so that I could discipline my student properly for his attitude. “It took some time, but I found us a charter that’s willing to sail east. This man’s name is Buccoli - he’ll be the one taking us.”

“Greetings.” The captain offered his hand and I took it. If the swordfish’s blood and oil coating my hand bothered him, he didn’t show it. He was a lean man, dark-haired with a mortal sailor’s complexion and a con man’s easy smile. “The Hero tells me you boys are gearing up for a bit of a journey.”

“Just running a few errands,” I replied, taking one last bite out of my fish and tossing the rest to the birds.

“Is that what it is?” he chuckled. “Suppose it might be for someone of your standing. Lately though, us crude men give the Aegean a bit more respect than that. I imagine that’s why the good Hero made it this far down the beach before he found someone who’d take his money.”

Griffon’s head tilted. “And why is that?”

The weathered captain raised an eyebrow. “The Raging Heaven Cult’s lost their kyrios. I’ve heard of cultivators seeking isolation, but you couldn’t avoid that news if you tried.”

“We know,” I said. “What does that have to do with sailing?”

Buccoli shrugged. “Same thing as a red sun at dawn, if I had to guess. Poor omen. Doesn’t help that most of the ships that were out east when the kyrios passed have yet to make it back.”

Griffon and I shared a look.

“Then why are you risking it?” he asked the obvious question.

Scythas answered in the captain’s place, bouncing a leather pouch in his hand so that the coins inside of it could be heard striking one another.

“I’ve never been able to turn down a good deal,” the captain confessed. “It’s why I have a wife for every major port and a crew that most captains wouldn’t bother pissing on. That’s them over there.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

I raised an eyebrow. “Your crew or your wives?”

“Cultivators are truly cruel,” Buccoli said ruefully.

“Them?” Griffon asked. “The ones loitering by the decrepit skiff?” Scythas winced as the former Young Aristocrat stalked past, and I nearly did the same when I saw it for myself.

“Was the ship a bargain, too?”

“Might as well have been free,” he said proudly.

Scythas and I joined Griffon at the stern of the beach ship. The crew scattered, likely as much due to the look on Griffon’s face as the orders Buccoli started hollering at them. We examined the vessel in silence. I walked a slow circle around it while Griffon pressed and prodded at it with pankration hands.

“It’s the best we’re going to find,” Scythas finally said, unable to bear our silent judgment. “For now, at least. Once we make it to the port at Krokos we can charter something sturdier.”

“If we make it,” Griffon murmured.

Scythas scowled. “You’re free to walk this beach yourself if you think you’ll find something better.”

“Far from a high hurdle. We might be better off swimming.”

“We could walk,” I muttered, considering the paths available. “If we skirted Macedonia…”

“We’d be at this for years,” Griffon said, waving the suggestion off. “Three months is already a steep enough task without trying to march it.”

Behind us, the captain Buccoli‘s voice rose in anger. Arguing with someone further up the shore about prices. Some market dispute or another. I ran my hand along the ship’s keel. It felt nothing at all like the Eos had, and looked nearly rotten by comparison. The ship’s sail was tied up, but I could still see patchwork colors that differed from the rest in its folds. Tears that had been mended.

“You have some experience with sailing,” I said quietly. Scythas grimaced and nodded once. “Is this vessel capable of the kind of sailing we may need it for?”

Could it outrun a real ship? We could add ourselves to the crew’s efforts, but past a certain point the ship would have to do the work. To say that I was a novice seafarer would have been an understatement. I couldn’t tell one way or another if this would be enough. The ship inspired little confidence in me, but if Scythas said it would suffice then I would take him at his word.

The Hero of the Scything Squall gripped the starboard rail. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” Griffon declared, pacing around the ship to our side. “I know it won’t. And so does this one.”

A ragged young man followed close behind the former Young Aristocrat, an eager smile stretching his chapped lips. Rail-thin with a former slave’s brutally misshapen posture, he nonetheless thrust out an unchained hand and gripped my forearm as tight as a mortal man could when I returned the gesture. His forearm was so thin that the tips of my thumb and middle finger touched when I gripped it.

“Terrible ship, sir,” was his cheerful greeting. “I wouldn’t sail it through a bathhouse.” He was missing three teeth in the top row and two in the bottom, grouped in such a way that I knew they had been knocked out rather than rotten.

“Where did this man come from?” I asked Griffon, confused.

“I was trying to get Buccoli’s attention so I could have him address some concerns,” the leonine cultivator explained, his disgust clear, “but he was too preoccupied haggling with this one’s friend to pay me any mind. This wretch did see me, fortunately, and ran over to confirm my suspicions.”

Scythas looked ready to spit blood. “You’re taking his word for it?”

“Why not? This sorry ship reeks of fish and has more nets than rowing benches. Who would know a fishing vessel better than a monger?”

“I’m no fishmonger, sir.” The young man was as unbothered by the assumption of his occupation as he was the name Griffon had called him. He raised both arms and flexed, and to his credit what little flesh he had was pure muscle and enduring sinew. His eyes crinkled, brown and vibrant as he declared, “I’m a mercenary!”

“Ho? And what sort of rate does a mercenary charge with a body like yours? Show me your weapon of choice.”

He was no cultivator, that much was clear. He didn’t have a cloth to cover his emaciated torso, let alone arms and armor of any sort. To call him a wretch was unkind - but it wasn’t a lie.

“Not that type of mercenary, sir. Rather than a soldier for hire, think of me as an ethically ambiguous ferryman.” He slapped one of the decrepit ship’s oars. “This right here is the only weapon I need to do my work.”

“You’re trying to poach our business,” I realized. Up the beach, Buccoli’s crew were meandering their way through stalls over to their captain and the man he was heatedly arguing with. The mercenary ferry’s companion didn’t look much more promising than him, but the man’s running mouth didn’t once falter even as they surrounded him.

“We’re bound for Thracia, you understand that?” Scythas said.

“We’ll have you there and back before you know it!”

“And what will it cost us?” Griffon asked, as if he was the one paying.

The mercenary opened his mouth.

“Free!?” Buccoli exploded, and the mercenary nodded happily while we all turned to look. The captain Scythas had secured shoved the mercenary‘s companion back, nearly throwing the similarly emaciated man clear off his feet. “You’ll take my charter and you’ll do it for free? What do you think you’re playing at!?”

“That is a bargain,” Griffon mused. “What’s your name, ferryman?”

“Hoiple, should it please you!”

“I think it might.”

“You’d be fool enough trying a scam like that on mortal men, let alone two cultivators and a Hero,” Buccoli berated the mercenary’s companion while we approached. The captain’s collection of layabouts and drunks pressed in, forming a ring around them. “If I was a righteous man I’d let you try it and reap your earned reward. But I’m not, and I’m being paid far too much to let you do as you wish.”

“The only deceitful man here is you,” the mercenary's companion fired back without hesitation. “Naming obscene rates like you’re the Hero and not the one transporting him.”

“The supplier names the rate!” Buccoli thundered. “The client decides whether it’s fair to pay - that’s how clean business is done!”

“Your rate is too high!”

“Right, of course! I should drag my men from their families and brave the bleak Aegean for nothing at all, just like you.” Buccoli rounded on us, his men parting to allow us into the circle. “Is this your doing? Lather me up and let me name my price, then send in your proxy to threaten me with an undercut?”

“Please,” Griffon scoffed. “If I cared enough to haggle I’d have done it myself.”

Buccoli looked at me.

My eyes rolled. “If this was my doing, he’d have at least started off with a believable number.”

“We’re here of our own accord,” Hoiple asserted, standing between Griffon and I.

“And you can be gone of my accord.” The captain hacked and spat phlegm on the mercenary‘s bare chest. “Fuck off.”

The man in the middle of the sailor ring lunged forward and punched Buccoli in the jaw.

A short while and some venomous cursing later, I dumped both mercenaries in the sand behind me. Griffon hummed an absent tune, a pankration hand holding each sailor up off the ground while another pankration hand each lazily smacked their faces. Scythas, for his part, held the captain back while he howled for blood.

I crossed my arms. “You wanted our attention? You have it. What’s your real price?”

“Could be a labor of love. Perhaps they admire the great Hero and his pretty lips,” Griffon suggested, returning Scythas’ ugly look with a smile.

“That’s twice you’ve mentioned his lips today,” I pointed out. Griffon snorted. Returning to the supposed mercenaries, I rolled my wrist. “Speak.”

“Lae and I are new hires, sir,” Hoiple explained. “The boys picked us up a few weeks back and told us to keep an eye out for a gold-haired cultivator in fancy red silks. Said he’d probably have a mean looking bastard with him for company. Begging your pardon, sir, but Lae and I figured that was you.”

“You figured right,” Griffon assured them, his pankration limbs abruptly flinging Buccoli’s crew out into the Ionian. He sidled up beside me and looked curiously down on the two mercenaries. “So then. Who is it that’s been looking for me, and why are they offering to do my work for free?”

“Not for free, sir,” Lae said. He was every bit as emaciated as Hoiple, but his bushy eyebrows and his dark, heavy beard gave him an illusion of greater fortitude. “The boys charge a king’s fortune for their services. It’s just that you two paid up front.”

“Here they come now,” Hoiple said, rising up and waving cheerily at the distant serpentine lane of the breakwater.

“This is a joke,” Buccoli said furiously. “Worse than that, it’s a waste of my -” Scythas tossed him down face first, eyes wide as he looked out over the Ionian.

“Is that-?” he breathed.

Griffon hummed. “Well now. There’s a sight for sore eyes.”

“Thank you, but we’ll be taking their offer instead,” I informed the sputtering captain.

Griffon and I set off with Scythas in tow to greet the Eos.

1.72

The Young Griffon

I collapsed onto my back in the sand, breathing heavily. My body ached fiercely, satisfying as it throbbed. I ran my tongue over my bottom lip and prodded the split flesh. Sol had given it to me good with the first punch, I’d allow him that much. Of course, I’d given him twice as much in return.

I swallowed down blood and saliva, stretched my arms over my head and sighing as tension unwound from my body along with my soul.

“I think I needed that,” I said to the cloudless sky above. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Sitting beside me, Sol gingerly curled and uncurled the fingers of his left hand. He’d left his mark on me, but he’d cut two knuckles open on my teeth and bruised his hand in the process.

I saw from the corners of my eyes the nervous looks sent our way by nearby members of the dock town. We hadn’t brought any real pneuma into our little scuffle, of course, but that didn’t really change things. Sol may have exchanged his indigo attire out for a nondescript white chiton and a beaten bronze breastplate underneath, but I was as I was. Even the grimiest sailors and fishwives among the crowds recognized the cult attire of the Rosy Dawn that hung from my waist.

Conflict between two cultivators was cause for concern no matter what. Just because pneuma was not involved now did not mean it would not be involved later. Fortunately for the mongrels on the docks, they were safe from the two of us.

“You didn’t tell me why the pearl city concerned you,” I said, going over the conversation in my mind again. Sol grimaced, looking distantly out over the Ionian. Somewhere else entirely.

“The Egyptians are… strange,” he finally said, in such a way that I knew it was an understatement. “As different as the Cursus Honorum is from the Greek cultivator’s journey, the Egyptian way is a thousand times further removed. In some ways, it felt like they weren’t even reaching for the same goal at all.”

“They’re barbarians,” I said simply. He snorted.

“As am I.”

“Only half.” I waved an airy hand. “Your better half alone is worth more than any lesser culture’s best.”

“You truly believe that?”

I offered him a sharp grin, bloodied by the lip he had split. “Until I’m given a reason not to.”

“Greeks,” he said, like a curse. “What about the Conqueror?”

“What about the Conqueror?”

“A Macedonian is a barbarian like any other, isn’t it? You and every other Greek that dare speak of him have gone to great lengths to emphasize his separation from your culture. And yet despite being lesser than you, he terrifies you all so much that you won’t even say his name. You resent him so much that you refuse to offer aid to the home of one of your own greater mystery cults, simply because he was the man that built it. How can it be said that his people are lesser to yours, given that?”

“Exactly because of that.” Sol looked at me like I was simple. Sneering, I made it clear for his lesser half. “The free cities spit on him at every turn. We denied him admittance to our Olympic Games even after he came riding into our lands with gifts of such riches that Croesus would have blushed to look upon them, even after he lavished us with praise for our works of architecture and the accomplishments of our thinking men. He all but begged us to let him compete for glory alongside our greatest heroes, claiming Greek ancestry traced back to the free city of Levanta, and we told him no.

“Tell me, Sol, what would you have done in his place? If you marshaled every scrap of wealth and ancestry that you could and sang your praises to the guards at the gate, only for them to spit in your open mouth, would you still want to pass through? In place of the Conqueror, would you still desire admittance to our culture after that?”

“I never desired it to begin with,” he said, and I laughed.

“Worthless Roman. At least you’re honest. But let’s say you did, and let’s say I’ve just spit in your face and thrown back all the gifts and riches you brought along to bribe me. Would you still want in?”

“You know I wouldn’t.”

“I do. Because you’re better than that. The Conqueror was not.

“No one can deny that he was a powerful brute, but a brute is all he was. When the free cities sent him back to Macedonia in shame without an olive leaf crown, he did not wash his hands of us. When he came back with his armies and tried to overtake us, he still valued the words of our holy women over his own. To the point of separating himself from his own men, risking his entire campaign for a word from an oracle worth listening to.

“And after that? Look no further than his pearl. After being cast out not once, but twice, he still knew his place. He could have kept the greater mystery of Scattered Foam for himself. He could have built his city over top of it and fortified it against any Greek incursion. Do you have any idea how much it would have tormented us? Knowing that another piece of our faith’s mangled mosaic had been found, knowing it was just across the Mediterranean Sea, and not being able to reach it?”

The Conqueror could have drawn all of the free Mediterranean into a war on his terms, on his continent. Or he could have proven all of us cowards if our city-states refused to rise to his challenge. Even if I tried, I couldn’t think of a more fitting retribution for the scorn he had received than that. Standing where the Conqueror stood, looking through his eyes like they were mine, I knew what the discovery of that scattered foam in Egypt would have seemed like to me.

Justice.

“He could have made us all suffer if he had only kept it for himself, the most natural thing a Tyrant can do,” I said, every word more scornful than the one that came before it. “But he didn’t. Even then, triumphant and proud, he knew Macedonia’s place among heaven and earth. So he bundled it up and presented it to us like he had the rest of his gifts when he first came to Olympia, and if I had to guess, he told himself that building a Macedonian city over a natural Greek phenomenon made it his.”

In that way, he could tell himself that he had contributed something to the greatest diaspora in the world. He could pretend he was one of us. But he wasn’t then, as he wasn’t now. As he never would be.

For a long moments, only the sounds of gently lapping waves and coastal industry hung between us.

“I knew Alexander occupied a large space within the Greek collective consciousness,” Sol eventually said, regarding me with naked interest. “But I didn’t realize you hated him personally.”

“I don’t.” What a ridiculous suggestion.

“That wasn’t hatred?” he asked, waving his bruised hand as if to encompass everything I’d just said. “I’ve seen judges sentence men to execution with less vitriol than that.”

“It was not,” I affirmed. “The lion has no hatred for barking dogs.”

“And between the two of you, you’re the lion,” he said doubtfully. “That’s what you think. Griffon above the Conqueror.”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t punch you that hard.”

“You aren’t funny,” I reminded him, lest he forget. “More importantly, haven’t we already agreed that strength alone is not the deciding factor?”

That night before my cousin’s wedding, while we drained the Aetos family’s filial pools with spoons, Sol and I had talked about all the places in the world that we would see if we had the chance. All the things that we would do. We had also talked about my family’s opinion of me, and the greater Greek perception of bottlenecks.

“You told me back at the filial pools that strength alone did not define virtue,” I mused. “If I had drowned you in one of those pools and ascended to the Sophic Realm because of it, that by itself would not have been enough to make the action righteous. You told me that and I agreed.”

Sol frowned thoughtfully.

“Cultivation is refinement of self,” I said. “The Conqueror was a nightmare and his armies were unlike any the free cities had seen before - I’ll never argue his strength. But strength was not the question. The Conqueror was powerful, yet forever unrefined by the standards of those that mattered. He knew it as we knew it. It’s why he tore the east apart, taking everything he could from better cultures. Because he knew he could never produce those wonders himself.

“So yes. He may have been the meanest dog in all the world, but he was still a dog. How could I hate him when I know that everything he accomplished was the least of what I am capable of? The Conqueror stood at the peak of what a barbarian could be, and from the day I was born that peak was so far below me that I could hardly see it looking down.”

Sol leaned away from me, as if I had pressed him back with pankration hands. He raised a hand to his forehead, dropped it, and raised it again.

“That is… breathtakingly arrogant.”

“Thank you,” I said modestly.

“Far beyond delusional.”

“So you say.”

“Where did all the heat come from, then? If he’s so far beneath you, why get worked up by the comparison at all?”

“I was already fighting a bad mood, and he does irritate me. He could have tormented us after he found the mystery of the Scattered Foam in Egypt. A barking dog is one thing, but he could have savaged us. Devouring was his only virtue, and the one time the dog should have eaten, it dropped its meal outside the lion’s den and fled east with its tail tucked.

“It’s not that he was too audacious,” Sol realized. “It’s that he wasn’t audacious enough. You revile him because you would have done things differently in his place.”

“That should have been obvious from the start. His culture is beneath mine, but how can I hate a man for hungering above his station? I’m exactly the same. That’s why the hound from Macedonia irritates me. Because he tried to charm what he should have taken.”

He had appealed to higher power.

“At any rate, we’ve strayed from the topic at hand,” I said, and Sol blinked, seeing for himself how far the ship had drifted off its course. “The Egyptians are bizarre, even more so to a Roman than a Roman is to a Greek. Elaborate.”

His lips thinned while he searched for the words. I rolled over onto my stomach and laid my cheek on crossed arms, waiting patiently.

“They’re old,” he began. “Their golden age ended thousands of years before the first Greek city was built. Rome, by comparison, was nothing but an infant colony. Their perception of the world is ancient, and their morality is matched to it.”

“Meaning?”

“They gut their dead,” Sol explained, haunted. I wondered what I would see if I could look through the same memories he was at that moment. “In a process they call embalming, they hollow out the corpse and harvest all its organs except for the heart. They drag the brain out through the nose with metal hooks, because cracking open the skull is apparently one desecration too far. The harvested organs are stored in jars and the body is laid out on a bed of salt for weeks. Stuffed with it, if the corpse was wealthy enough in life to afford such treatment.”

“For what purpose?” I asked, my nose wrinkling at the thought. I had no intention of ever dying, but that didn’t mean I was without manners. Death was a sacred tragedy - even a corpse was owed its dignity.

“It dries the body, draining it of its liquids so it won’t rot. When it’s done they rinse the corpse with wine and stuff it full of spices and aromatics. Like it’s a meal.”

“Why?”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “They sew it up after that, wrap it in linen and lavish it with decorative jewelry before sealing it away. They bury the corpse with its valuables so that it can take them with it into the immortal thereafter. The greatest of them, Egyptians of high standing, even took their servants with them.”

“How long does this process take?” I asked.

“Two months. Sometimes more.”

“But not more than three,” I clarified, and he shook his head. “Then when you say they take their servants with them…”

That wasn’t nearly a long enough time frame for even a shackled slave to die a natural death.

“The newly risen queen offered Gaius an unprecedented honor after the battle was won,” Sol said bleakly. “A proper Egyptian burial for the legionnaires that we’d lost, guaranteeing life after death for every one of them. To that end, she invited him to join her privately in observing the embalming of one of the fallen Egyptian generals. So he could see for himself the profundity of what he was being offered.”

“He brought you along with him,” I concluded.

“The general took three servants with him into the afterlife,” Sol explained, confirming it without pausing. “They stripped each of them down, and before our eyes they cut open their throats as the slaves prayed over their master’s corpse. Then they gutted them all.”

“I take it your uncle opted out of that one,” I murmured.

“We burnt the corpses that day. The queen assured us there was more than enough land available to bury them intact, but we didn’t trust the Egyptians not to go digging them up after.”

“Disgusting savages.” For once, Sol readily agreed to my sentiment.

“They don’t view even intrinsic things the same way that you and I do,” he went on. “Life and death are hardly distinct concepts to them at all - their cultivators don’t measure success in the avoidance of death, but in the execution of it. Their model of the soul has eight parts rather than the Broad’s three, and they believed that if a man led a virtuous life and his corpse was properly observed, his vital breath would find its way back to his body after death. Reanimate it and change its form.”

“Naturally. And I’m sure you saw the truth of that in motion,” I said wryly. When he didn’t respond, I raised myself up on my elbows, eyes widening. “You did? Truly?”

“I don’t know.” He scowled, more at himself than at me. “Some of the things that I saw there… I can’t explain them, even now. Gaius told me once that the worst institutions of any culture are generally also the ones that linger. All I can say of Egypt is that it’s had more time than any living nation to accrue those ugly institutions.”

I reached up and laid a hand on his shoulder, feeling the tension beneath his skin. “Infernal or not, they can’t be that bad,” I assured him. “You managed to bring them down, after all.” He sighed.

“Maybe.” That storm built slowly in his eyes. “Or maybe we just didn’t recognize their victory when we saw it in their hands.”

The eddies of a Hero’s influence washed over us, and Sol’s expression cooled as he turned to regard the source. Burying the memories once again.

“Solus!” Scythas called out to us from far down the beach, waving an arm emphatically. “I’ve found a ship!”

About time.

1.71

The Son of Rome

Having aired his frustration, Griffon seemed to shake the worst of his foul mood. Whether it was relief after admitting it, or irritation with himself for letting it show so clearly, he throttled his violent intent and restrained himself to his usual provocations. We both took a dip in the Ionian, and then while we waited for Scythas to secure us a ship we spread the map out on the sand and discussed the task ahead.

“Bakkhos lived a full life, if nothing else at all,” I marveled, tracing connecting lines through the drops of liquid gold that Socrates had marked the map with. “No matter what order these took place in, the journey alone…”

I had done my fair share of marching since my father took me with him to Gaius’ legions. I had seen vast frigid wastelands, trudged through marshes and built bridges across the seas, and even traversed Hercynia Silva, the black forest that spanned entire nations - not once, but twice. Cultivation lent speed to a man’s stride, but even then Gaius’ campaigns had taken months and months of travel before combat ever came into play.

I had spent my formative years marching, yet the task ahead was still daunting. The map Socrates had given us covered a vast expanse. The region I was most familiar with, known as Magna Graecia to the Greeks, was only a bare sliver on the western edge of the papyrus. The mountainous region home to Alikos, the Scarlet City, was the only label west of the Ionian. There were no golden marks to be found there.

East of the Ionian, the central landmass of the free Mediterranean was marked by gold in four places. One in Levánta, the city-state just over the mountain ranges east of Olympia. Another was at the southernmost coast, a city-state marked Krōkos with a smaller label beneath it that ominously read Infernal Frenzy Cult. Further north, above the Coast and its two opposing mystery cults, the city of Paléta was partially obscured by another drop of gold. Finally, on the western coast and furthest north, edging towards the grand territories of Macedonia, the fourth golden marker was accompanied by the word Aornum and nothing else.

“It’s going to be longer for us, starting in the middle like this,” Griffon said, lounging on his side in his preferred way, with his cheek propped up on a raised palm. His golden hair was still dripping seawater, slicked back without its usual waves. His eyebrows furrowed as he tapped the marker in question. “I have more than half a mind to ignore the good philosopher’s suggestion entirely. Begin somewhere more sensible.”

“And do what when we get there?” I asked wryly. “Ask around for the ingredients to make divine nectar? Say our prayers and hope we’ll know them when we see them?”

He scoffed, but we both knew it wasn’t feasible. Socrates had only given us one clear objective to start with, and that was a golden cup filled with sacred wine from the region marked beneath Griffon’s finger.

Thrace, the land with no definite boundaries. The marker was east of Macedonia and just off the coast, north of the Aegean Sea. It was our first destination, and we’d evidently need to sail if we wanted to make good time.

“If the Gadfly would just give us a proper list, we could hit four of ten before Thrace was a spec on the horizon,” Griffon lamented anyway, sweeping a finger up from Krókos at the southern tip of the central landmass and along its eastern side, to Levánta and then out east into the Aegean Sea where another golden marker resided amidst a cluster of islands. Then he dragged his finger back west and north up the coast, passing Paléta before finally docking at Thrace at the northern edge of the Aegean.

“He may not know exactly what to look for just yet,” I said. Then, having spoken my day’s worth of diplomatic statements, I added, “or more likely, he just wants to keep us busy.”

“Worthless old man,” he muttered. “The journey is long enough without him adding on to it.”

It was true. It would have been an arduous undertaking even if we had managed to convince Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris to assist us in the end. There were still four more markers left after those six. The next closest was on the free Mediterranean’s easternmost landmass, just off the coast of the Aegean - Nkrí, the Greek city-state home to the Blind Maiden Cult. From there, the remaining three were truly distant.

“It’s these three that concern me.” I said, indicating each one. They had been the first to draw my eyes when Socrates gave us the map. Two that were all too close to home, and one that was dauntingly far.

South of the Aegean, beyond the Alabaster Isles, two more golden drops had been placed at the bottom of the map. One was in Libya. The other was in Egypt, a golden drop atop the world’s second largest - no. It used to be the second largest city in the world, before Rome was burned and salted. Now it was the first. The map marked it simply as His Pearl. Apparently, even writing Alexander’s name was a risk too far for the Greeks.

The last of the three that concerned me, the tenth and final marker, was so far east that the map could not properly place it. A winding arrow indicated a likely path, but the destination was uncharted. The location was a single word.

India.

“What is there to be concerned about?” Griffon asked airily. “It’s only a quick jaunt through the Conqueror’s favored city and then a brisk march off the edge of the world.”

I pressed my finger to Libya.

“The hounds took Africa from us first,” I said quietly. Griffon’s eyes sharpened, losing their mirth. “By the time we realized, it was too late to do anything about it. We had already committed to fighting them in Gaul. No matter how many eagles we sent, not a single one was returned. It’s been nearly four years since then. There’s no telling how much of the southern continent they’ve devoured since.”

“Is that so?” His tone was thoughtful. “Seems we’ll be gutting your dogs sooner than later, then.”

“No,” I said, though it tasted like ash. I inhaled slowly, the salt of the Ionian thick in the air. “Not yet. Not until I’m strong enough to sweep them all into the sea.”

“We’ll see.” Griffon drew an invisible line with his finger, just west of Alexander’s pearl city. “Regardless, we can tell this much. No matter how fearsome those dogs are, this is as far as they’ll ever go in Libya. No free city has ever fallen to a barbarian incursion - demonic or otherwise.”

“Wrong.”

He blinked.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re wrong,” I said, brushing his finger aside and deliberately laying my own over the pearl city in Egypt. “This one fell four years ago. To us.”

“Impossible,” he said immediately. I met his gaze steadily. After four seconds I saw the first spark of confusion, smothered quickly by disdain. “It’s a bit late for propaganda, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed. Disdain gave way to doubt.

“Prove it,” Griffon challenged me.

So I reached out, at the same time immersing myself in bittersweet recollection -

The limestone blocks of the towering lighthouse were slick with sea mist, made worse by the sweat on my palms. My heart hammered a frenetic beat in my chest, so loud that I nearly couldn’t hear the men cheering down below. I forced myself to keep climbing. I refused to back down.

When I finally made it to the top, gripping the shoulder of the Father’s faceless statue, I took the Eagle standard out of my teeth and tied it to the statue’s outstretched hand.

Gaius’ men roared gleefully as I leaned back and waved down at them, the Pharos of Alexandria bearing the Republic’s flag for all the world to see.

- and I obliged him.

“What?” He breathed, his eyes unfocused as he played the truth of my lived experience over in his head. “What?”

“It was Gaius’ last campaign,” I explained, clenching my fist above the map and withdrawing it. “The final one before… before. I saw the Egyptian navy sink into the Nile with my own eyes, and I watched the beasts of virtue lurking beneath its waters tear their king limb-from-limb. The pearl city welcomed Gaius with open arms after that. As did their new queen.”

I muscled down an old unease, memories of the queen in Egypt and her inhuman eyes. A headdress that was no headdress at all, feral ears jutting up from the crown of her head like an animal’s. I had seen far uglier sights prior to that day and since, but the memory of that first meeting always unsettled me. Nearly everything about that city and its people did.

“That- hold on.” Griffon buried his face in his palm, pankration hands manifesting at either temple and massaging with incorporeal knuckles. “That doesn’t make any sense. Even if your legions somehow managed it, there should have been aid from the north. The Amazons, the Alabaster Isles, the mainland. Us. Someone.”

“The enlisted men didn’t understand it either,” I admitted. “We were pursuing an enemy from within, the last of Gaius’ opposition in Rome. That Egypt would offer him safe haven was one thing. But that they chose to fight us alone when we came marching up their shores, with possible allies just over the Aegean? They thought he was tempting the Fates.”

Looking back, maybe he was.

“But he convinced them in the end. His reasoning was simple. Yet profound.” I shrugged when Griffon made a gap with his fingers to stare incredulously at me. “You Greeks so revile the Conqueror, or otherwise are so terrified of his memory, that you refuse to even write his name on your maps hundreds of years after he left. Why would any of you lift a finger to help the city he built for himself?”

“Because it’s ours.”

“Is it? The city in Egypt, built by a Macedonian - what about that sounds Greek to you?” It was an honest question, one that I had wondered about for months after Gaius’ conquest there. All the way up until word came from the west, and everything else ceased to matter.

“This,” came Griffon’s sharp reply, muffled by the hand over his face. A rosy pankration finger jabbed sharply down on the map, scraping the golden marker just beneath His Pearl away from the papyrus and revealing the words scrawled underneath.

Scattered Foam Cult.

“The free cities threw back the Conqueror at the very start of his campaigns,” Griffon explained, raising the rosy finger to his mouth and scraping the gold onto his tongue. “Some say that he could have taken us if he had truly desired it, but most of those people are disgusting Macedonians and their word means less than a Roman’s. Whatever the case, he left the Greek cities with nothing to show for his labors, and we made sure he knew it.

“It’s only natural for a man to harbor a grudge over failure like that. Any man, let alone the Conqueror. We had denied him admittance into our culture, taken from the starving Tyrant his first substantial meal, and he despised us for it. He never made another overture into our cities, but he took everything that surrounded them. And eventually, inevitably, he found for himself something incredible.”

“A greater mystery of the world,” I murmured, eyes widening.

“The one thing that we could not possibly ignore,” Griffon agreed. “He found something in the fields of bountiful Egypt that did not belong there. He found something of ours. And so, when he sent his smug heralds to inform us of his discovery, we free cities had no choice but to accept his gracious offer - the construction of a proper city to house this profound natural phenomenon at his own expense, thereafter surrendered to the Greek diaspora where it surely belonged. Any Greek citizen would be welcome within its walls. His only requirement being, of course, that they obey the governance of the Macedonians that had built it.”

Their alternative options being war with the man that had so recently brought them to the brink, or a willing forfeiture of a key to their mystery faith. No choice at all, in the end.

“I think you just answered your own question,” I mused. “The city was only ever yours by technicality. Whether the Macedonian on the throne is beholden to themselves or to another barbarian benefactor, the outcome is the same. Why shed blood for it?”

“As if it would have been some great sacrifice on our part,” he said, his lip lifting from his teeth. “It was only Rome.”

This time, I punched him.

1.70

The Young Griffon

Olympia‘s western dock town was as I remembered it, though it felt downright decrepit after weeks spent in the grandest city in the free Mediterranean. Stout wooden constructions were the standard out here, no amethyst-veined marble or towering bronze doors. It was refreshing, in a way. The beaches were teaming with fishmongers and their patrons, a cool breeze of waning winter offset by the cheerful warmth of unclouded sun.

The port’s rubble mound breakwater could be seen from a respectable distance, jutting up from the Ionian several spans out. It hugged the coast up and down as far as mortal eyes could see, and if the maps were to be believed, a bird or a god looking down on it from above would see the winding lines of rubble as a gorgon’s snarling face - each of the tangled serpents that served as her hair a point of entry for enterprising ships. It was a sight that Nikolas had boasted seeing for himself after returning home for his wedding, all the while smugly refusing to explain how he’d done it.

I had a few ideas, myself. Someday soon I’d bring one of them to life and have a look for myself. See the ugly leer that the free Mediterranean cast across the Ionian at her lowly scarlet colony. Later, of course, when there weren’t more compelling things to do.

I cast a lingering glance at the Roman walking down the beach beside me.

“You were confident about that one, weren’t you?”

Sol’s lip curled in silent contempt.

“There was weight behind those words, I could tell,” I said, considering the crowded shacks and broad and oak tables buried in the sand for the day’s catch to be displayed. “It wasn’t difficult at all to imagine you in your armor, cape and all. Was that how you spoke to your legionnaires? I’m sure It inspired them on their way to the underworld.”

Strong hands grabbed up my shoulders and spun me around. Scythas pulled me down to his eye level, his influence clashing with my own. Hands of my violent intent clamped down on his own shoulders along with his arms and neck, fisted themselves in his faded green robes and glowed with building heat.

“What is the matter with you?” Scythas demanded, golden coals burning.

“The Oracle wasn’t wrong,” I mused, leaning further in. This close, it was impossible to deny. “You are a pretty thing. Thicker eyelashes than most marble beauties, and lips well suited to pouting. If you shaved that stubble you’d be a hot commodity in any bathhouse.”

I added my flesh and blood hand to the mess of pankration intent, pressing my palm flat against his forehead and pushing him down. The Hero’s pneuma rose. His lips pursed for a whistle.

“Leave him be, Scythas.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall scowled. “He had no right.”

“No,” Sol agreed. “He didn’t. I apologize on his behalf.”

“I wasn’t talking about what he said to me.” The fair Hero shoved me off and whistled a sharp note, blasting my pankration hands off his body with gale winds. “I’m going to find us a ship.”

He stalked off, muttering ugly oaths under his breath.

“Farewell to the brave Hero,” I said, waving a solemn goodbye. “We can only hope to meet again one day when the stars align above. Remind me why you brought him instead of the reaver?”

“Jason won’t set foot on a ship as he is,” Sol answered, sitting down right where he was and burying his feet in the white sands.

“Of course he won’t,” I said, collapsing beside him and leaning back on my elbows to watch the sea. The waters were gentle this close to shore  - it was a calm day, and the breakwater stifled what waves there were. “Naturally the Heroic sailor is afraid of sailing. I’d expect nothing less of your companions. A shame mine weren’t quite so useless, really - your speech might have swayed them if they were.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, without any particular expectation.

“A broad question. Where to begin-”

“Griffon.” He struck me with a look. As if there were a discerning mind behind that heavy Roman brow. “The others might think you’re just being more of yourself, but this isn’t like you. Cruelty of this kind isn’t your style.”

“Ho?” I raised a challenging eyebrow, dismissing a pair of errant pankration hands when they formed and reached for his throat without my permission.

“Your father‘s story shook you,” Sol said, irritatingly certain. “It’s the only reason I didn’t break your jaw when you said what you said just now.”

“I thank the Legate for his compassion.” I bowed my head, which in my lounging position was more a tucking of my chin. Perhaps I’d take this time to replenish my body. Scythas wasn’t liable to find us a worthwhile vessel any time soon, and the sand was as comfortable as anything else.

“Was it your uncle?”

I dismissed another formless hand, scowling. “Which one?”

“The dead one.”

“No.” Idly, I fingered the pommel of the blade I had stolen off my father’s wall. It was a different blade than either of the blades that Anargyros had carried in the vision of his ascension. Even the sliver I had pulled from its sheath was enough to tell. It was bronze, where the first had been iron and the Talon had been ship wood. But It still thrummed like lightning when I touched it.

And the hilt was still the same.

“Your father, then?” he guessed, because that was all that he could do. I spat a vile taste out of my mouth. Onto the sand between us.

“No. It wasn’t any one of them alone.”

Sol pondered that, dragging a hand through jet black hair. It was getting longer, just a bit wild - only on the top, though. He shaved the sides down every day with a knife.

“Paradox logic,” he said contemplatively. “Truths and convictions. Manipulation of natural law. Those concepts were as novel to you as they were to me when we first arrived here.”

“They weren’t novel. The greater mechanisms of cultivation were known to me long before I ever met you. All that I was missing was the practical example. I just had to see it done.”

For each application of rhetoric, all I had needed was to see it.

“And yet you never did,” Sol said. “I’m the same, I think - the lessons Aristotle taught me always felt purely academic, but when Socrates was showing the practical side of rhetoric to me, it felt like a natural continuation. I just hadn’t made the connection. But I have the excuse of spending half my life in legion camps and barbarian kingdoms far from any Greek philosopher. How did you never once encounter a philosopher’s rhetoric during your time in the rosy dawn?”

My eyes rolled. “I’m sure I did. But I didn’t have a Sophist’s sense to recognize it for what it was at the time. A Philosopher’s rhetoric is as grand and unfathomable to a Citizen as a Hero’s glory is to a Philosopher.”

And as unfathomable as a Tyrant’s greed was to all that languished beneath them.

“It wouldn’t have been as clear to you then as it is now, but you would have known it if you were told what to look for. If someone had taught you, you could’ve distinguished it, as you would any application of pneuma.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” I asked.

“You were angry in the Temple of the Father, when you first identified what the crows were doing and realized it had been left deliberately out of your education.” He reached over and pressed two fingers to my forehead, tapping it sharply. “Now we’ve seen what your father and your uncles were doing at the same age that you were studying supply chain logistics and competing in games rigged for your benefit. And you’re furious.”

“That isn’t it either. Not entirely.”

He hummed knowingly. “Calliope.”

The skies above were clear, blue, and bright. What would they look like when I took my first step into the realm of Heroes, I wondered. Clear, blue, and bright, or thick with shining stars? Would lightning strike me from cloudless heaven, unmistakably meant for me? Or would it be like it had been up in the storm crown at Kaukoso mons? A negligent bolt, tossed down alongside a hundred others. Perhaps a tribulation. Perhaps nothing more profound than mortal misfortune.

“Appealing to higher power,” I murmured, and felt my blood begin to boil.

“Ah. That.”

“Yes. That.” Distantly, far enough that I couldn’t make out the words, Scythas’ voice rose up over the ambient clattering of the dock town. Sol didn’t turn towards it. He kept watching me. “What is the first virtue, Sol?”

“Gravitas.”

“No,” I snapped. “Not the cultivator’s answer. Give me your answer. The one you gave me at the rites.”

“… freedom.”

Freedom. In every story worth telling, the cardinal virtues were present in one form or another. But none of those were possible if a man couldn’t control his own destiny. That was what an audacious slave had said to me in the midst of my cult’s holiest procession. He had rounded it off by calling me a slave just the same as him.

I had hated him for it then. But I had agreed.

“We agreed back then that virtue was performative excellence, and that for a man that meant climbing the divine mountain and throwing off his destined threads. Standing in defiance of the Fates. Standing proud. Free.”

“We agreed,” he admitted. He began to understand.

“But my father didn’t.”

‘Appealing to higher power’, they had called it. My late Uncle, the Talon Anargyros, and my father in the eddies of his Heroic ascension. They had used it to explain the actions of the mad Tyrant that ruled the Raging Heaven, as well as justification in the fight that would become the first. And I had been forced to watch through my uncle’s eyes as he came to that realization himself. I had been forced to feel the same awe that he felt as if it was my own. As if this was something worth celebrating. As if it was something profound.

We’re all reaching up hopelessly. Foolishly. Courageously. Hoping someone will reach down and take our hand, though we’ll never admit it. Hoping they’ll pull us up to heaven with them.

What was the point of making it to the top and casting off your chains if you spent every step up groveling at the feet of those above? How could I take any pride at all and being a freeman, if I had spent my life a willing slave?

“I’m irritated that my education was stunted,” I said, shrugging off the doubtful look my brother gave me. It was the truth, and nothing more than that. “I’m disappointed that Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris chose against us in the end. And I’m angry, yes, that my father and my uncles decided that the righteous path was to charm their way into the Ivory Heights. As if we need the whispers of Muses to accomplish incredible things.

“But I am furious,” I said, heat and clenching fists of pankration intent spawning around me as fast as I could dismiss them, “because the Stavros and Fotios that I know as my uncles are nothing at all like the men we saw in that story. I am furious because Anargyros Aetos died before I was born, and he took the spark that those four brothers had with him.

“I am livid,” I explained to the last son of Rome, the only spark that I had found in a city that should have been teeming with vitality. “Because the Aetos family that I saw in that vision looked like fun. And I missed it.”

1.69

The Son of Rome

Anastasia‘s shadow pulled away deliberately from mine beneath the wood-carved table, an active separation that was impossible to see and nearly impossible to feel. I nearly hadn’t noticed it at all, the sensation for some reason so much deeper now than the last time I remembered feeling it that I’d almost mistaken it for something else entirely. If Anastasia’s eyes hadn’t given her away, smoldering flames flickering in response to Griffon‘s silent message, I might have dismissed it as a remnant from the story.

Griffon hadn’t caught it. The state he was in right now, he might not have even if he knew what to look for. But shaken or calm, I could never forget the feeling of a scavenger creeping into my shadow.

As long as I lived, I would never forget the rats.

The raven that lurked inside of Griffon shadow roiled beneath the table, raising a bronze hilt up in offering. Anastasia‘s smile deepened to match the schemes in her eyes, and in response to the challenge the raven in his shadow brandished twenty iron hilts alongside the bronze.

“I didn’t meet Damon Aetos until a year ago, when he was already the man he is today,” I answered the question the Heroes around the table had posed, the silence having stretched long enough. Through my shadow, as sharply as I dared, I added, We’re not fighting here. Stop posturing before they notice - where did you even get that many swords?

The scavenger edged back in, listening curiously while the woman controlling it continued perusing Socrates’ map.

“So that story took place after he’d already been to Rome,” Scythas said, before frowning. “Unless, no. He could have gone after, but that would mean…”

Souvenirs from our lesson with the Gadfly, Griffon's shadow answered mine, withdrawing the hilts of his celestial axe and twenty iron swords.

“That would mean he taught Sol just a decade or two ago,” Jason said doubtfully. “Taught. Even the Gadfly only advised Bakkhos, as he’s advising Sol now. How can a Philosopher be master to a Tyrant?”

“What is it about him that makes you want to kiss his feet?” Elissa asked him scathingly, jabbing a finger at me while she pinned Jason with a glare. “Who says he’s a Tyrant at all?”

You’re a terrible actress, Griffon‘s raven taunted Anastasia‘s fluttering crow, while he laid his cheek in his hand to stop its furious clenching. Shoving your face into a map like it will save you from giving yourself away.

It worked on you, her crow replied laughingly.

“Who says? You were there when we went out posing as crows! Have you not been paying attention?” Jason demanded.

“A question I could ask a few people,” Griffon mused. He went ignored. Beneath the table, he added, It never will again.

No, nothing ever works twice on you, does it?

“Whatever he is,” Kyno interjected, pulling down the Sword Song’s pointing hand. “He can tell us himself.”

“He already has,” Scythas declared.

Though it won’t mean much to them, Anastasia’s shadow mused, wings fluttering as it mingled between mine and Griffon’s.

“Well?” Lefteris asked, leaning forward on the table.

“It’s rude to ask a man his standing among heaven and earth without first offering your own,” Griffon chided him.

“You’ve been to our cult and walked up the stairway to heaven - our ranks are plain to see. Yours aren’t.”

“Mine is.” His smile was just the wrong side of sharp, his affected levity noticeable even to the boys sitting by Lefteris. “In fact, I just saw it earlier today.”

“Liar,” Lefteris accused him, rising from the table. His fuchsia cult attire, negligently wrapped as it was, spilled nearly entirely off his shoulders and exposed his bronze breastplate. “I checked them, every step from the twenty-first to the thirtieth. Not one of those names was yours!”

“You checked the wrong steps,” Griffon said, eyes narrowing. “The twelfth step is where you’ll find me”

“More lies,” Elissa muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The same now as before. And you wonder why we don’t want to go chasing after myths with you.”

Perhaps the truth this time, Anastasia advised him through her shadow, throwing his words back in his face.

A single pankration fist formed in the air above the table. It raised its index finger, its glow casting a shadow across Griffon’s features.

“Call me a liar one more time,” he invited the room, and I knew what was coming next.

“Stop.”

Kyno pushed Lefteris’ chin up, closing his mouth with a click of teeth against teeth. Elissa crossed her arms mutinously, still leaning against him, but didn’t speak further. Anastasia‘s scavenging shadow withdrew from my own, the woman herself finally looking up from the map on the table to regard me curiously. Jason silently reached back and dumped his cup into the clay jar of spirit wine.

“Solus?” Scythas asked me quietly. I closed my eyes, falling back into a state of mind that felt too familiar. More comfortable than I deserved it to be.

Get to the point, the first spear had advised me in my last private moment before assuming control of the fifth legion. Truth or dishonesty, bright news or bleak, whatever it is you have to say - be direct, or don’t say anything at all.

“I am a Legate,” I told the Heroic cultivators arrayed against me. Lefteris’ eyes widened. “In Rome, a man’s standing is measured by his place within the city. Our realms are different than yours, eight instead of four. We have our own paths, as you have yours.”

The Soldier. The Senator.

And of course.

The Captain’s path.

“Whichever path a man takes, the outcome is the same. It’s called the cursus honorum, and it is the progression of a Roman soul.”

“And how far down that road are you?” the man in the crocodile skin asked me. Lefteris mumbled something undistinguishable, unable to open his mouth with the massive cultivator’s hand still pressing up on his chin. He smacked Kyno’s hand away and tried again.

“A legate is a commander,” he said, staring hard at me. Searching my face for falsehood. “A man that leads thousands of soldiers directly.”

How interesting, Anastasia‘s crow softly cawed. Lefteris, for his part, grit his teeth and ignored her caustic gaze.

“He does,” I said, nodding once. “A full legion. I commanded men that together could sweep a hundred drakaina screaming back into the sea.”

I said the truth this time, Griffon commented, no less irritating for the fact that I didn’t have to hear him say it aloud.

Hush, Anastasia scolded him, and he snorted.

“So you are then,” Scythas said.

“A Tyrant,” Jason said with quiet conviction.

I grimaced.

At a certain point, the lies would have to end, or else be found out. If Griffon and I managed to convince any of these Heroic souls to journey across the free Mediterranean with us in search of the component pieces that made up a god’s sustenance, then we would almost certainly run into conflict. Real conflict, the kind that required force on the level of what Griffon’s roll of papyrus had shown us.

If that sort of crisis found us out in the valleys and the mountains, or on the open waves, or any wild place apart from the free cities, the Heroes and Heroines among us wouldn’t have to restrain themselves. They would fight freely and their hearts flames would burn triumphantly. Griffon and I would be found out the moment we failed to keep up.

If we failed to keep up.

“The Republic despises Tyrants,” I said, apologizing silently to the first spear and my father and everyone else that would have throttled me for what I was considering. “No citizen of Rome would ever accept such a title.”

“Call it what you like,” Elissa said impatiently, shifting her weight. Anxious at what I was saying, and at what I was not saying. “Every barbarian nation has a different word for what the free cities know is true. Where do you stand?”

“Elissa,” Kyno said sharply.

“It’s fine.” I exhaled a long breath. This would work, or it wouldn’t. At this point, all I could do was try to reach them. Griffon was too rattled by the story of the brothers Aetos to be anything but vicious right now. That wasn’t what they needed.

“We despise Tyrants,” I said again, “but that does not mean we can avoid them. There are those among us with power and influence comparable to what you consider the Tyrant realm. The laws of the Republic exist to balance these men, to temper them so that they can never be to Rome what Damon Aetos is to the Scarlet City.” I met Scythas’ eyes, and stifled my desire to soften the words that came next. “What Bakkhos was to Olympia.”

I watched him wilt, as I had down in Selene’s quarters when I forced him to admit to the true nature of those that led the Greek mystery cults. He was the Hero that had protested the loudest at the desecration of a great man’s funeral, and he had just borne witness to that same great man’s casual cruelty through the lens of lived experience. He had looked up to Bakkhos, I knew. But that didn’t change a Tyrant’s nature.

“Alas,” Griffon murmured. “No law is absolute.” I inclined my head, acknowledging it.

“I have seen men that were Tyrants and everything but name,” I admitted, even though the words tasted like ash in my mouth. “Men that commanded legions enough to fill three Greek cities. I’ve seen men that have taken entire civilizations into their hands, and crushed them when they struggled. I would put my money on any of those men before I would put it on a Greek. Tyrant or not.

“I served under the greatest of those men,” I told the Heroes all around me. “I fought in his legions, was there when he broke the Gauls and the Britons and the Celts over his knee, every barbarian king one by one. Those of us following him knew him as the general of the west. But there were those that called him something else.”

“Tyrant of the west,” Anastasia murmured, and Griffon sat up from his slouch. “Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar.”

The weight of every word hammered down on my shoulders, pressed by three thousand dead men. I grit my teeth and set my shoulders against it.

“Gaius was a Tyrant,” I said, words that would have made any man in the fifth legion spit blood - including my own father. But I have seen too much, and known him too well, to think anything else.

If you must break the law, break it to seize power.

“But he was the best a Tyrant could be,” I promised them, infusing every word with the captain’s conviction. “The least of a necessary evil. There was no one among the patricians more generous to the plebes than he was, no triumphant commander as merciful to their fallen enemies. He was what he was for the betterment of Rome, and he was beloved by the people because of it.

“It’s why they lauded him in the streets even as his rivals spread the word tyrant through their homes. It’s why they raised him exalted above all others in the city, even as the provinces shut themselves away. And it’s why time again, against overwhelming numbers, he kept marching on - even as rats ate at his unguarded heels.”

The Heroes and Heroines in the room tensed and inhaled short breaths, the young brothers huddled behind their guardian, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I felt my expression twisting, ire rising in the thunder of marching feet.

“I owe a portion of everything that I am to the general of the west, as I owe a portion to Aristotle, and to every other mentor that has tried to make me more than I am. He was the ideal Tyrant, the only one deserving of the influence afforded. And even so, his rivals tore everything they could from him. Even so, they shamed him in the forum while he was on the furthest edge of the western world, shedding blood so that they could live their lavish lives. I served with that man, learned from him directly, and came to understand what a guiding hand could be.

“And then I came to Olympia.” My clenched fist finished what Lefteris had started before, breaking the wood-carved table down the middle. “And I was reminded why the Republic swore to never suffer another king.

“Caesar wept the day he found his greatest rival dead,” I said furiously. “And your elders started groping for the kyrios’ power before his funeral was over. They sent scavengers after their cult’s own initiates, heedless of anything but their own hunger. Heedless of those that depended on them.

“Heedless of their citizens.”

I remembered a family curled up screaming on the streets of Olympia as Tyrants hammered away at funeral drums. They had known that the citizens of the city were in attendance, that the volume they were using to distract and disorient their greater targets would debilitate the smaller souls. They had done it anyway. They had used them as obstacles.

That family of citizens had looked at me like I was a monster when they saw the mystery cult attire I was wearing. And they’d had good reason to.

“I came to this city in search of my Greek mentor, because my Roman mentor is dead. I came in search of an old mentor’s guidance, and instead I found this. Instead I found all of you.”

Sorea slammed into the door to Elissa’s home, an audible thunk of his talons sinking into the wood followed by a piercing shriek, and the sound of the door breaking out of its frame echoed down the hall.

The virtuous beast that was all I have left of my home came gliding into the room a moment later, landing on my shoulders and spreading his wings wide.

“I am no tyrant,” I told the wide eyed cultivators of virtue. “But I am heir to the greatest of them, and I am a Roman before that.

“All of you saw something in that memory, in the deeds of triumphant Heroes, that you wanted for yourselves. Each one of you is fighting a Tyrant that has you in their grip. And you’ve decided that the Olympics are your best chance at salvation. Each of you is hoping that an Olympic champion’s cry for help will suffice where your own did not.”

I took the unrolled papyrus in my hand, dragging it up out of the dead hearth. It cracked and broke apart in my clenched fist.

“You are, all of you, appealing to higher power,” I condemned them.

“You’re wrong,” Lefteris seethed. “You’re wrong, and you’re out of line. You have no place lecturing us- you have no place here at all! You should be dead.”

Scythas’ head snapped to him. “What?”

“What are you saying?” Jason demanded.

“He’s saying,” Anastasia said, caustic green eyes flickering, “that the Republic has fallen, her people slaughtered to a man. Solus has come walking into this city from out of a grave. A revenant from Rome.”

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised at all that she knew. Griffon had called her a terrible actress, but she had fooled me twice the day we shared a bath.

“The city of Rome is salted ash,” I said, acknowledging the truth and moving forward. Marching on. “The half of my soul that lives in Rome wasn’t enough to bring down the demons of risen Carthage. The half of my soul that is Greek will have to do the rest.”

“The half that is what?” Elissa asked.

“I came to Olympia looking for Aristotle, but I found a rat’s nest instead. I chose to hunt your elder’s crows because they make me sick, and I hate them to my core. I will tear your free cities apart, drink whatever divine elixir your gods fill their cups with, and topple all of your Tyrants if that is what it takes to gain the strength I need.”

It was the only way I could possibly convince them all, the wildest gambit I could think to take.

I told them the truth.

“I am a stranger in a foreign land, and all that I desire is the death of accursed Carthage,” I promised them all. “I will stop at nothing in this life until I am strong enough to see it done. Come with us on this journey and every journey to follow, or don’t, neither choice will change that.

“All that will change is you. Either you’ll stay here in this poisonous city, hoping and praying that the accolades you win in a game will be enough to win you favor from higher powers. You’ll cling to that proxy power and hope it’s enough to get you out from under the Tyrant’s thumb. You’ll wait breathlessly for your freedom to be delivered.

“Or you’ll join us,” I said, clapping my hand on Griffon’s shoulder. “And you’ll take it.”

1.68

The Young Griffon

I leaned back.

Six Heroic cultivators crowded around the table alongside Sol and I. They had been at the furthest edges of the room when the story began, but now each of them leaned forward on elbows and crossed arms to get as close to the fading papyrus as they could.

In the dull silence that followed the story Chilon had gifted me, the world seemed to lose a certain quality that I hadn’t known it possessed before. Without the warmth of heroic glory suffusing the air, each breath felt colder in my lungs than it truly was. Without the lights of triumphant flame suffusing all above, the shadows in Elissa’s home seemed that much darker.

“-iffon?”

I blinked. Little King Leo tugged again on my arm, confused and wary. To my right the little sentinel, Pyr, crouched beside their guardian, watching Lefteris with concern.

“Yes?” I responded belatedly.

“When are you going to tell the story?” the little king asked as the last embers died out in the hearth and the papyrus dimmed.

“It’s already been told,” I informed him. His expression tightened indignantly, his distinguished nose wrinkling.

“Leo. Not now.” Lefteris shook his head once, his eyes riveted to the story on the table. The little king made to protest, thought better of it, and slunk back to his brother’s side.

In the weeks since my arrival at Olympia, I had achieved an adequate understanding of the Heroes and Heroines gathered around the stout wooden table. Nothing near what I wanted, but assuredly more than they were happy with me knowing. Their mannerisms, the quiet martial habits that they carried with them everywhere, as well as their feelings towards one another. There were power dynamics at play there, ire and affection depending on who was paired with whom.

It was a given that they had all known each other before Sol and I ever set foot in their city. Heroic cultivators weren’t nearly common enough for them to have missed each other. It was said that in a crowd of a hundred Citizens you might find only one lonely Philosopher. The same rule applied the further up you went. In a crowd of one hundred Philosophers and ten thousand Citizens, if you were fortunate, you might find a single shining Hero. The city of Olympia was an exception to this rule in some ways, especially when it came to her Tyrants, but not enough for these six to be unacquainted.

Our Heroic companions had history. They had enmity and affection for one another. The three that I had claimed as my own were friends, or at least friendly. Elissa was familiar enough with Kyno to not stab him when he held her back in her heated moments, and Kyno was familiar enough with her to know when she needed holding back. Lefteris liked them both well enough to try warning them away from me, and they liked him well enough to try to justify their involvement.

Sol’s companions, similar to the Roman himself, were a mess. Jason and Scythas kept company with each other but hated my three, and my three disdained them both in turn. Anastasia was somehow feared by all, in the way that hunting cats feared a cobra - a wary understanding of her nature. They weren’t cowed, but they kept their distance from her when they could. For her part, she regarded them with a cool amusement. Content to let them skirt around her.

All of that was gone now. Those small nuances that they so carefully kept, the thousand-thousand truths and convictions they had used to sculpt their identities. The interplay between each other. Whatever required conscious effort to maintain had been stripped away. Friends did not look to friends to discuss what we had just seen. Enemies said nothing to enemies as shoulders and knees brushed together at the crowded table.

Scythas, Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, Jason, and Anastasia had each withdrawn into themselves, struck by a portion of what we had all seen. I knew them well enough to know it had been a different moment for every one of them that did it. I had my suspicions as to what those moments had been. But for now, I could still only guess as to why.

Finally, I glanced at the Roman directly across the table from me. Gray eyes stared piercingly back.

You didn’t know, the raven in his shadow whispered to mine under the table, quiet enough that the others wouldn’t hear.

There are many things I don’t yet know, the raven in my own shadow whispered back, levity in shifting ink. You’ll have to be more specific.

In lieu of a response, Sol clenched his fist and then slowly unclenched it on the table. His eyes trailed meaningfully down. I followed his gaze.

Hm.

I relaxed my right hand, dismissing fifteen hands of violent intent that had layered themselves in the same space. Pain drove through each finger like a needle as it uncurled. My nails weren’t long enough to break skin, but they had left four crescent grooves in the meat of my palm.

You didn’t read it first, Sol accused me.

There wasn’t time. I flexed blood back into my fingers, distantly observing the pain. If I had been taught the hunting bird’s breath, I could have dispersed it. Made it future strength.

So you laid it out in front of them. Legendary cultivators from all over the known world whose motivations and allegiances we still don’t fully understand. And you rolled the dice on this convincing them to work with us, rather than against. When you had no idea-

No.

I saw the storm gathering in his glare.

I knew it was a Hero’s story. Because the only other thing Chilon carried in his fishing net was the satchel of letters he’d never replied to. And I knew who it was about.

In a grand parade of one hundred heroes, only one among them could be expected to ascend to the realm of ravenous authority. It was only natural for that singular Hero to stand head and shoulders above the rest. A legend among legends. A Hero’s deeds were always worth hearing of, no matter if they lived and died at the lowest of the ranks. But that didn’t mean they were all equally inspiring.

Every Tyrant was once a Hero. Every Tyrant was once the greatest of one hundred greats. The magnitude of their deeds could only reflect that.

The details were irrelevant. What was important was that each of these wilting cultivators had seen what a Hero was meant to be. That even for just a moment, they had felt what they could feel if they only took the risk. Glory above all.

The contents didn’t matter.

I inhaled deeply, and listened past the roaring in my ears as my brother broke the silence.

“Elissa,” Sol said. “Do you have any wine?” The Sword Song stiffened and looked up from the table, blinking rapidly. Unaccompanied by her usual scorn, the scars that riddled her ceased to be fierce - they became something nearly tragic.

“Wine,” Elissa murmured, desert flames flickering fitfully behind her eyes. “Yes. This calls for wine.”

The Sword Song all but ran out of the room, returning shortly thereafter with an impressive clay jug balanced precariously on her shoulder. She reached for a pitcher of clear water on a nearby table to dilute the wine, decided against it, and snapped her fingers.

“Cups.”

The Heroic cultivators in the room reached absently into the folds of their chitons and tunics, pulling from them cups for Elissa to fill. Paradox logic, pockets of folded rhetoric that they kept hidden in their clothes. It was different than what I had expected, nothing like the space within my shadow. Somehow more and less profound now than it had been before I knew the trick of it.

Kyno and Lefteris murmured quiet thanks while she filled their cups with thick red wine. Anastasia nodded in appreciation, thoughtfully regarding the long sheet of papyrus. Sol had no cup to fill when Elissa reached him. Instead, he dipped a hand into the open jug and took a mouthful from his cupped palm. She grimaced but moved on without a word.

While Jason drained his portion in one pull and Elissa went to fill Scythas’, the Hero of the Scything Squall broke the heavier silence. The one that talk of wine and niceties hadn’t breached.

“Bakkhos,” he breathed, and Elissa dropped the jug.

Pankration hands caught it just before it shattered, glowing faintly with the rosy light of dawn. I raised the jug to my mouth with hands of formless intent and drank deeply of the undiluted kykeon, setting it aside when my insides were sufficiently warmed. Elissa left it there.

“Bakkhos,” she echoed Scythas, leaning heavily against Kyno’s shoulder - he was tall enough that she could do it standing while he sat. “I knew that was his name. I know I knew that.”

“We all did,” Kyno agreed.

“And yet you haven’t said it once.” I ignored their bristling and brushed off the unspoken you do not belong in the air. “Sol and I have been in the city for over a month, and in all that time I have never once heard the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult referred to as anything but that. Not even the night of his funeral, while you all told stories in remembrance of him.”

There was nothing they could say to that, because of course it was the truth.

“You’ve all forgotten the name of the Tyrant Riot, the man that terrorized greater mystery cults for no greater purpose than his own amusement.” I pressed both palms flat against the table and leaned forward, sweeping across each of the Heroes. “You’ve buried him in your minds deeper than your elders buried his corpse.” Anastasia, sat beside Sol, glanced up through the coal black fringe of her hair in brief acknowledgement. The rest of them-

“Aristotle taught Damon Aetos,” Lefteris blurted, as if unable to believe it. “The Father of Rhetoric mentored Damon Aetos.”

Did you know that? The raven in Sol’s shadow asked mine.

Did you?

He frowned and shook his head minutely.

“He taught more than just him,” Anastasia said meaningfully, tilting her head at Sol beside her without looking up from the papyrus. Her fingers traced lightly over the map, brushing Chilon’s story aside where it obscured it.

“Damon Aetos is your senior brother,” Jason said with a hysterical sort of wonder, dashing wine from dark stubble where it had spilled past the corners of his mouth. “Wait, unless! Is he-”

“Your junior?” Scythas asked, intent sharpening his focus.

Kyno frowned. “Did you know him personally? Before he was…”

“A Tyrant? Elissa suggested.

“A Hero?” Lefteris added.

“Himself.”

Once again, a group of people that should have known better wavered on the edge of an outrageous assumption.

They had an excuse this time, I supposed. The story of my father and my uncles was still a vivid silhouette inside my soul. We had looked too long at the sun, and now a portion of it remained when we closed our eyes. The memory of the Philosopher Aristotle so casually shedding his cultivation and his years was as fresh in their minds as it was in mine. Who was to say that his student wasn’t capable of the same? Even if they came to accept Sol’s status as a first rank philosopher now, a part of them would always wonder if he used to be more.

Normally, it wouldn’t even be a consideration. A shattered ego was the end of a cultivator, that was common knowledge. There were theories and hearsay remedies, certainly, but no one knew anyone that had benefited from them. In nearly every circumstance a cultivator of virtue chose death of the body before death of the self. Those that did cling to life afterwards led miserable existences, unacknowledged without as well as within.

If I’d been asked at any point in my life other than this one here now, whether a man could shed like a snake the culmination of his soul’s greater aspirations and carry on without breaking stride, I would have laughed. And then I would have spit.

Yet here we were. The Heroic cultivators in the room waited for the rank one Philosopher to tell them he was an ancient, that he had stood among the strongest before he chose to discard his ego like a torn rag. I could already see the questions that would follow creeping up their throats.

The son of Rome resigned himself to the room’s attention, arms crossed as he sought the words.

The truth, this time, I advised him through the shadows beneath the table. The one on your right is a physician. If she’s mended you before or does so in the future, she’ll know your true age.

Sol sighed.

She can hear us.

Anastasia smiled.

You gave me away, her shadow whispered teasingly.

1.67 [Aetos - END]

Youngest of the Convocation

Tribulation lightning.

There were as many explanations for it as there were thinking cultures on the earth. From the truly ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and golden Egypt, to the lowest barbarian hovels in the east and west, every cultivator knew a singular truth. Regardless of what we cultivated, how we cultivated, where we did it or why. One thing remained the same.

We were all reaching madly up to heaven. No matter what that meant to a man, the result was what mattered. Reach high enough, and Heaven will take notice.

Of course, Heaven’s response was always the same.

The bolt from Raging Heaven struck the Hero Anargyros and seared my vision white. Elena’s adamant shield rang like a bell, a sound altogether different from the unsettling reverberations that followed when she used it to block the monster. Not close enough to benefit from its protection, I was flung back by the force of my brother’s tribulation.

I scrubbed frantically at my eyes and spat a taste I had never experienced before out of my mouth, the faint echoes of what my brother had taken on his chin coursing through my body and wreaking havoc on my limbs.

When I managed to clear my eyes and rise again, my heart in my throat, I saw that my worry had been wasted. He stood in the same place, unchanged despite the fact that the sands around him had been turned to molten glass and the monster’s corpse beneath his feet had been charred from silver to black.

Urania was gone, if she had been there to begin with. Yet the Hero Anagyros still kept his silence, his head tilted thoughtfully as if listening to a voice only he could hear.

“The drakaina,” an old man spoke when the Hero did not. My brother blinked and looked down at the Father of Rhetoric, kneeling before the corpse of the serpent. “A female dragon spirit, a cursed spawn of Echidna and Typhon. Its scales are harder than iron, and its veins are filled with molten lead. It does not age. It can not starve. Any wound inflicted by mortal man will heal in moments, mended by its ichor.”

The Hero Anargyros said nothing still. Elena crept forward, peering over the rim of her shield with scarlet wonder.

“Only the divine can unmake what the divine have cursed to live forever,” Aristotle continued, raising a frail and wrinkled hand. His pneuma gathered between his fingers, taking shape as he manifested his intent - and I flinched and drew back my Sophic sense at the same time that Elena did. I swallowed, and tasted blood that had not been in my mouth moments before. Whatever intent the old philosopher had called upon, it was so sharp that it had cut my Sophic sense itself.

“With golden ichor running through your veins, or with arms and armor of incorruptible adamant. Those are the only ways I have ever seen a monster die.” Aristotle reached for one of the many gouges my brother had carved into the serpent, cauterized by the bolt of tribulation lightning. He drew his intent across its flesh, and his hand abruptly jerked as his intent broke against the serpent’s corpse. “Even in death they are impervious. Or so I thought.”

My brother hummed and pinched the unsharpened edge of the talon. With a twist and a sharp crack, he broke a splinter off the sword that had just slain an undying drakaina. Shaving an edge into it with his driftwood blade, the Hero Anargyros flipped the wooden scalpel so he was holding its edge and offered Aristotle the handle.

We watched the old man drag a wooden scalpel across flesh that had rebuffed bronze and tempered iron. Scorched scales and sinewy muscle parted like blooming roses, with no resistance at all. Aristotle‘s hand shook.

But his voice and his bearing were unchanged when he spoke. “I’ve seen you bleed before, Anargyros Aetos. It was blood, not molten gold that sprung from your wounds. You are no son of heaven.”

“No, elder,” the newly risen hero agreed. “Only the son of a good man, and a loving mother.”

“I’ve seen ships built,” the old philosopher carried on as if he didn’t hear him. “I recognize the timber that made the Talon, and I’ve seen wood of the same kind used in practice blades. That sword and the scalpel. Neither one is peerless adamant.”

“They are not.”

“I know what such a blade is capable of against a creature like this.” He scowled. “No. I thought I knew. This and a thousand-thousand smaller truths. I thought I knew.”

A sound like breaking glass assaulted my Sophic sense and my Sophic sense alone. I saw alarm steel across my brother’s face for the first time since our shipwreck. The flames behind his eyes flared and his pneuma, still pouring out of him in torrential waves, converged on Damon’s mentor.

“Wait-”

“I was wrong,” Aristotle admitted, and the three of us watched in horror as his cultivation broke apart.

“Stop!” Elena cried, lurching for him with her arm outstretched, as if she could pull him behind her shield and protect him from what was happening inside his soul.

The Hero Anargyros leapt down from the monster’s corpse, the stifling heat and wonder in the air around him growing thicker as he knelt in front of the Father of Rhetoric. The wings of his influence, vast enough to cast their formless shadow over the entire island, folded protectively around the old man’s hunched body. It did about as much good as Elena’s shield. This wasn’t something that could be defended against.

As cultivators of virtue, we refined ourselves with every step we took up the divine mountain. Through every advancement and every grand ascension, we built upon what we had built before. As Citizens, we gathered the materials and searched for the proper place within our souls to lay the foundation for what was to come.

In order to ascend to the realm of Philosophers, a cultivator needed to first lay the foundation inside their soul. Then came a man’s first principle. His first thought worth having. The culmination of all his efforts as a citizen. It was upon this foundation that a philosopher built a monument inside their soul. Every truth learned was a brick laid, and each principle internalized was another pillar that would bear the weight of all that was to come.

In a confrontation between cultivators of virtue, whether it be an exchanging of discourse in the agora or a round inside the marble octagon, that monument could be broken down like any other man made wonder. Done properly, with the right intent, a man could attack his opponent’s soul at the same time that he picked apart their arguments and assaulted their bodies. He could force his opponent to doubt themselves, could make a demon of their heart.

In the most extreme cases, you could even tear down the edifice that every cultivator builds inside their soul. Their monument to Ego - the culmination of all their efforts as cultivators of virtue.

Apparently, you could even do it to yourself.

Aristotle‘s Ego shattered and flew apart, and we all felt it in the deepest of our senses. The bricks of polished marble truth that he had used to build the walls of the monument crumbled and fell away, each one a disdainful whisper as it tumbled away. Then, one by one, the towering columns of his principles and ideals groaned, fractured, and fell apart in chunks, the impact of each as they hit the floor echoing in my Sophic sense.

The old philosopher’s soul shed more internalized truths in those paltry moments than most thinking men would ever learn. Nine times he discarded principles that had made him the most feared man in any agora for decades before I was born. He shed his pneuma too, a tired exhalation that filled the air with nearly as much vitality as my brother had been emitting since his ascension.

The difference was that my brother’s strength was still growing, outpacing everything he was throwing off. What Aristotle lost was not returned or replaced. In seconds, his influence fell from that of a Sophic captain all the way down to the very first rank of the Sophic realm.

When the stones stopped falling and the dust had settled in his soul, only one column of principle remained. The Father of Rhetoric inhaled slowly, tattered rags stretching tight across a rugged chest. Calloused hands rose and brushed thick dark curls out of weary eyes. The irritated scowl was the same as it had always been, even on a young man’s face.

“What have you done?” I asked, aghast. The man that had just shattered his own Ego and shed his wisened years alongside his principles and strength, pinned me with a glance.

“Humbled myself,” he said, as if that was any explanation at all.

“Elder,” the Hero Anargyros breathed, though Aristotle hardly looked older than him at all now. “Why? It’s all gone. Everything that you’ve built- our mentors told us stories about the Father of Rhetoric, about the wonders you unearthed from uncharted mist. And you just-”

“Threw it away,” Elena whispered, looking for all the world like she had just witnessed a murder.

Aristotle made a dismissive motion with his hand. Brushing off our concern, or maybe brushing the rubble of his Ego’s monument from the foundations.

“It wasn’t the first time. Odds are it won’t be the last,” he said, resigned. “A philosopher is a man seeking order in a chaotic world. We build walls inside ourselves, set boundaries - whatever we can fit inside those boundaries as possible, and everything outside of them is not.

“What you just did had no place inside the walls that I had built. But you did it anyway, and I saw it with my own eyes.” Aristotle shrugged. “When Ego obstructs possibility, a philosopher loses his curiosity. At that point, it doesn’t matter how appealing those truths and convictions are. They’re wrong. That makes them worthless.”

“That’s the opposite of what you should be taking away from this,” my brother said in exasperation. He laid a hand on Aristotle’s shoulder, sky blue flames burning earnestly behind his eyes. “There will always be an unknown, a contradiction or a truth we can’t explain. The Father of Rhetoric should know better than anyone that any truth can be made a lie with the right persuasion.”

“In these moments more than any other,” Elena said emphatically, “conviction is the way forward. Every path has its obstructions. If you discard your progress every time you reach one, double back and search for a different, perfect path every time, you’ll never reach your destination.”

“Sometimes we have to step off the path and walk uncharted steps,” the Hero Anargyros advised the wise man, glory rolling off him all the while. “The world of Heroes and Tyrants is different from the world of Citizens and Philosophers, but that doesn’t make your knowledge worthless. There are just some things that reason can’t explain.”

“No.”

Aristotle was a newly minted philosopher again. His pneuma was unmistakably that of a first rank Sophic cultivator. Far lesser than Elena’s, laughable compared to mine, and an entire realm apart from my newly risen brother. In nearly every way that mattered, his cultivation was crippled.

And yet.

All three of us could not help but attend when the father of rhetoric invoked the only principle he had retained. The one marble column left standing inside his soul.

“There is nothing in this life that cannot be explained.”

I fought the urge to bow my head, and as a result saw the exact moment that my brother’s disbelief gave way to mirth. The Hero Anargyros laughed and stood, whirling his driftwood blade.

“Urania says that this is why her sisters despise you,” he said, eyes crinkling. “Trying to tear down all the world’s mystique and wonder. Even if you could, how do you know you’d be satisfied at the end of it?”

“I don’t,” the philosopher admitted freely. He laid his hand on the corpse of the drakaina. “The only thing I know is that I know nothing at all.”

The drakaina vanished.

If I was careful about it, I could fit three jugs of wine and enough food to satisfy me for a week in the pocket of folded logic within my cult attire. Anything more and I risked losing all of it. Aristotle had just tucked a serpent large enough to devour an elephant whole into his rags.

“I’m keeping the scalpel as well,” he declared, and this time even I had to snort at his priorities. “I’ll need it for the dissection. Later. When I’m not surrounded by mouthy children and sanctimonious muses.”

“And if it doesn’t cut when I’m not there?” my brother asked, amused.

“Then I’ll have learned something regardless.”

“Gyro,” I said, wincing as I reached for what was left of my strength. Across the beach, distant enough that the silent monster’s rampaging could hardly be heard over the roar of the whirlpool, Fotios and Dymas along with Damon’s freedman were doing their best to draw the serpent with a woman’s torso to us. Damon was nowhere to be seen. “The work’s not done yet.”

“Take heart, brother,” he told me, gazing knowingly up. “We’re nearly there.”

For the second time that night, lightning lit up a cloudless sky. Elena crouched and raised her shield above her head, and I readied the hunting bird’s breath to disperse what came, but it didn’t hit any of us. It struck the Ionian, piercing through the whirlpool and lancing down through opaque waters.

The roaring inhalation of the monster Charybdis stopped. The island, the entire thing, shook once, twice, three and then four times as something too vast to be described choked beneath the sea. And then it was done.

I followed my brother’s line of sight. “Ah.”

“How spiteful,” Elena whispered.

The whirlpool created by Charybdis’ grand inhalation was wide enough to fit the entirety of Alikos inside of it, and deeper than our eastern mountain range was tall. Without the monster’s grotesque suction to maintain the currents that had drawn the Eos and so many other unfortunate ships in, the Ionian sought to rebalance itself.

The sea collapsed in on us, dark waters swallowing up the stars in the night sky above. Fotios hollered in alarm but I couldn’t see from where anymore. The only light left came from the blue flames in Gyro’s eyes, and those were angled up at the falling hammer that was the Ionian Sea.

“Humbled just in time to see the underworld, like the Broad always said,” Aristotle lamented, leaning back on one hand. “Worthless student - if you’d been faster than your brother, I could have died ignorant and proud.”

“Who says you have to die at all?” Gyro asked him lightly.

Light bloomed beneath the island.

A scarlet glow rose like blood in water, seeping up over the rocks that lined the shores and illuminating every span of the beach. Broken and battered ships, dozens of them, were revealed by the rising light. Precious cargo scattered carelessly across the beach, chests cracked open like oysters. Their contents glittered in the light - ornate metal works, coins of gold and precious gems, some half-buried in the sand and others sitting in plain view. Entire fortunes left to rot.

Scarlet pillars of light rose up out of the collapsing currents, five of them in all, and arched up over the island. Each one was glory and triumphant vitality, so bright I had to squint. To raise my hand against them or be blinded. They curled together overhead, the curtain of falling waves replaced with a dome of brilliant light.

The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn took the island in his hand, and the Ionian whistled and shrieked as it sought to subsume the Rosy-Fingered Dawn and was vaporized instead.

“And here I thought I was showing off,” Gyro said ruefully.

“This is too much,” Elena said quietly, barely audible. “He’ll burn out.” It seemed to hit her, then, and she grabbed my brother’s arm and pulled him urgently to her. “Anargyros! We have to stop him - he’ll burn himself away!”

Our father had told us long ago that a Tyrant alone could survive without a heart, and only then because he had no other choice. To become a Tyrant, a man had to be a Hero first. And a Hero’s nature was to burn. Brilliantly, gloriously, for all the world to see. But burn nonetheless.

We called the light behind a Hero’s eyes their heart’s flame. We called it that because it rose and fell in time with their spirit, their joys and their sorrows, and we also called it that because of what fueled it. Every flame needed fuel, an Aetos knew that better than anyone. Within a Hero, there was only one source that would suffice.

The heart’s blood.

Hero’s burned their own blood to draw glory from their souls. It was how they defied Tyrants an entire realm above their own, just as they defied monsters and cruel nature. It was why every Hero’s story was a tragedy in the end. Greek fire was unlike any other in the world. Once it started burning, it never, ever stopped. Not until the world was ash.

It was said that a cultivator wasn’t fully committed to the divine climb until they reached the Sophic Realm. Prior to that, they could live a citizen’s life and be content. But even a wise man could find some solace in his studies. It wasn’t until the third realm and the fourth realm beyond it that a man was left with no other choice but to reach the heights.

It was every Tyrant’s fate to starve, no matter how many they consumed. And it was a Hero’s destiny to burn, no matter how they stifled their passions.

“The low flame burns the longest,” I quoted our late father, and Gyro smiled. Elena flushed, having pulled her to him almost nose-to-nose.

I forced my aching body to move, warming up to a sprint as I made to help my twin. Behind me, I heard Gyro finish the quote.

“But we don’t light candles to usher in the Games,” he intoned. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him grip the back of Elena’s head and press their foreheads together. Startled, she raised her adamant shield with its bisected sun and pressed it half-heartedly against his chest. She didn’t pull away, though. “My brother will die on his own terms, whether it’s here and now or never at all. Let me handle my mad siblings, and I’ll let you handle yours.”

“Oi,” I called. “Don’t lump us in with Damon.” The wings of my brother’s Heroic influence smacked me upside my head. My vision flashed white and I stumbled, snickering.

“You aren’t what I expected of the Rosy Dawn,” Elena admitted.

“Thank you.”

The Oracle’s daughter huffed a laugh.

Within the clenched fist of the Young Aristocrat’s burning spirit, the entire island was lit up. I could see the treasures left behind and the ships laid to final rest on the shores. I could see Fotios, Dymas, and Damon’s man as they raced to meet me in the middle. And I could see what my twin was pointing to, back they way they had come.

The second drakaina wasn’t pursuing my twin and the members of our crew. The woman fused to its silver coils straightened her back and drew up her monstrous bulk, expression unreadable as distant as the creature was. Its attention was focused on someone else entirely.

“Elena?” I called back.

“Yes, Stavros?”

“Is that one yours?”

Bathed in scarlet light, her anklets and bracelets and necklaces and earrings - all of them ruby and gold - glinting as they swung, a woman with the same golden hair and scarlet eyes as Elena raced across the beach. Her form was inexperienced and she had a bolt of bloodstained silk pressed against her mouth and nose, but she had started running while we were distracted. She was already past Fotios and the crew. The drakaina watched her steadily as she sprinted towards it.

“Calliope!” Elena cried. Fotios’ brow furrowed, mirroring mine.

“The muse?” I asked, confused, as we finally reached each other. Fotios shook his head, bracing his hands on his knees and panting for breath. Dymas planted his blade in the sand and leaned heavily against it, while Damon’s man collapsed entirely to his hands and knees.

“Unless she’s a Heroine in disguise, I’m thinking not.”

“Her sister,” Aristotle said, abruptly beside my twin. He cursed breathlessly and stumbled sideways.

“I was hoping you’d lost that ability,” I said sourly. He snorted.

“Lost it-?” Fotios’ eyes widened as he noticed the young man where an old man should have been instead. “Aristotle? What happened?”

The overpowering glory of a Hero swept over our heads along with a very real shadow. Gyro sailed through the air with his Talon in hand, seeming to almost fly with the wings of his influence spread wide. Elena shot by moments later, her pneuma riotous with fear. Fotios and I shared a glance and took off after her.

“That’s your sister?” I asked, catching up on her left and ignoring my body’s worthless pleas to stop.

“She is,” Elena gasped, running like she was chasing gold in the sprints.

“And your father had the audacity to name her after the Chief of all Muses?” Fotios added incredulously, coming up on her right side.

The woman from Olympia bit down on a sob, furiously blinking tears from her eyes. “He did! And she’s suffered for his hubris! Now it’s come to this-!”

Her sister, the Oracle-to-be draped in jewelry and silks, stumbled and fell to her knees just short of the serpent woman. Her body, thin and frail beneath the finery, trembled as she coughed. The drakaina tilted her head, silver-white tresses spilling over her chest. The monster’s bulk shifted, lowering her torso down.

“She’s ill,” I realized. “She’s always been ill.”

Why did the kyrios of the Raging Heaven let an Oracle leave his city before she was properly anointed? Gyro had asked me. Why did their kyrios send her out with no one but her sister to protect her, yet gift them with an adamant shield and nectar to sustain them? I had found the answer another way, but it still applied here.

“Bakkhos was appealing to higher power when he sent the two of you alone,” I said, ignoring Fotios’ questioning look. Elena bit her lip. “What were you meant to do? Where were you meant to be?”

“Here.”

“Here? He sent the two of you to fight monsters?” A low rank Philosopher and her ill sister?

The frail woman raised her head, dropping her bloodstained bolt of silk as she did. The serpent with a woman’s face reached out, clawed fingers grasping for the daughter of the Oracle. She didn’t flinch away. Didn’t move at all.

“I snuck onto the ship against his orders,” Elena admitted, bitter tears taken by the wind as she shed them. “He sent her out alone. Not to fight.”

The woman known as Calliope knelt in the sands and awaited the serpent’s grip. Too weak to fight, too weak to even raise the ornate dagger in her other hand. Crippled by illness, cursed at birth for her father’s hubris. Yet, by Elena’s own admission, heir apparent to the mantle of Oracle. As if such an insult to the muses could ever be allowed.

“He sent her here to die.”

The Hero Anargyros descended from the curtain of scarlet light above and sank his talon into the serpent’s scales, cutting through undying flesh as easily as he had the first time. The monstrous woman recoiled from Elena’s sister, her mouth opening in a silent scream.

“He sent her here to die, and she thanked him for the privilege!” Elena seethed, outrage and hope rekindling her conviction. “They told her that this was the righteous path and she believed them! She told me not to come. She told me to take her place. She said that was justice for what our father had done, but even so-!”

“But even so,” spoke a voice I knew all too well. I dug my feet into the sand and Fotios did the same, both of us reaching out with unspoken understanding and grabbing Elena by either arm. She fought viciously against us, but I only pointed up ahead.

The Hero Damon Aetos stepped out of the light on the island’s edge, triumphant vitality and glory rolling off of him like heat from a flame. The concentric rings within his eyes glowed vibrantly, and his pupils blazed with his heart’s flame. Steam billowed off his body, and each stride across the sand left molten glass behind. He had our uncle’s bow - no, he had his bow in hand. But the quiver was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s out of arrows,” Fotios muttered.

“The Tyrant Pierus had nine daughters, and every one of them he named after a muse,” Damon said, heedless of that fact as he approached the monster. “That was his hubris. But it was his daughters that dared to challenge the nine in a contest of song. That was their hubris. That was their tribulation earned.”

Gyro flew back, his Talon wet with molten lead.

“The kyrios of the Raging Heaven decided to avoid the issue altogether, to offer one Oracle up to the divine and keep the other for himself. That was his hubris. He may have had good reason. He may have even been right to do it. But even so, even though he only wants one back, we’ll return to him both.”

Damon Aetos stepped in front of the Oracle-to-be and pressed three fingers to his chest, drawing an arrow of rosy flame from his heart.

“Once given and twice returned,” the Young Aristocrat intoned, nocking the arrow to his bow.

The Hero let fly his heart’s arrow and the serpent fell dead, pierced between the eyes. Fingers of a vast scarlet hand unfurled above us, revealing stars once more. Somehow, some way, he had lifted the entire island up out of the sea.

Calliope the woman stared up at the eldest of the four and spoke to him in a voice soft with shock and wonder.

“Who are you?”

“This is Justice,” Calliope the Muse answered. The Goddess with the Heavenly Voice cupped Damon’s jaw in her ethereal hand and laid her golden crown upon his head. “Remember his face.”

As if she could ever forget.

1.66 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Move, boy,” Aristotle said, grabbing a fist full of my hair and dragging me bodily across the beach. “You’re no use gawking.”

“Old bastard, you’re no use at all!” I slapped his hand away and staggered to my feet.

“Old bastard am I? What happened to honored elder?”

“What happened to you?” I snapped. “Where did you go while we could have used you?”

“Somewhere I was needed more,” he said, and had the audacity to sound exasperated. “Selfish child, you’re not even my student. Be thankful I’m here at all.”

“Who is that?” Elena called, eyes flitting from me to the old philosopher. Trying to decide which of us was the greater threat. “Where did he come from?”

“One of life’s greater mysteries,” I answered sourly.

A tremor in the earth rocked my feet out from under me a few steps away from the woman and her ship. Impossibly, absurdly, I saw the drakaina roll away from my brother with what looked to be an oversized splinter buried in one of its weak spots.

“Another!” Gyro called, hitting the beach and rolling backwards to bleed off momentum and avoid the serpent’s retaliation.

“You can’t be-“ serious, I tried to say, but stabbing pain in my chest cut the word off. I hacked and spat a mouthful of blood, sucking air through my mouth and feeling precious little of it fill my lungs.

Another shard of broken wood sailed through the air, tossed by Menoeces. This one was hardly fit for a practice bout compared to the one Gyro had carved, but he joined it to his iron hilt nonetheless. He shrugged tattered cult cloth from his shoulders and let it hang around his waist. He swiped the “sword” back and forth to get a feel for its weight and then went charging in again.

Warmth like afternoon sun bathed my left side. Elena knelt beside me, keeping her shield just out of reach and laying a hand on my chest.

“Breathe deep,” she told me. I tried, and cut it off half way before another coughing fit took me. When I exhaled, it was equal parts wheeze and whistle. Her eyes widened in dismay. “Your ribs are broken. They’ve punctured your lungs.”

“Tartarus it is, then,” I rasped, forcing myself to one knee and then my feet. There were many wounds that a Cultivator of virtue could shrug off where a mortal man would surely die, and the list only grew the higher up the mountain one climbed. Past a certain point, ailments ceased to matter at all. But no matter your standing among heaven and earth, there was one thing that could kill any cultivator if the worst came to pass.

Citizens and Philosophers could walk away from injuries that would cripple or kill a man with no standing. The Epics claimed a Hero could carry on even if they lost their limbs or lesser organs. Our uncle had told us, only once, in one of his sentimental moods, that a Tyrant could survive with no heart at all - so long as he could eat.

But beneath the light of raging heaven, every man needed to breathe.

“Conserve your strength, cultivator,” Elena urged me, trying to force me back down with a hand on my shoulder. Without her shield, though, she was only a low Philosopher. And while she had evidently trained her body as well as her mind, I'd worked mine harder. I rose anyway.

Gyro hit the beach again, the serpent pursuing him with another stake in its side. Menoeces threw him another crudely carved blade of wood, covered in his own blood. He immediately went to work on the next piece of wooden shrapnel, scraping it to shape with his fingernails for lack of a proper tool.

“That shield is adamant, isn’t it?” I demanded, the words scraping painfully as they left my throat. “It’s more than just a shield. You know it’s more than just a shield, don’t you?”

Elena eased back a step. “It’s…”

“Divine metal,” Damon‘s mentor said, suddenly leaning down beside her to observe the shield. She inhaled sharply and thrust the shield forward in a bash. He sidestepped it, tracing a finger over the scarlet sun embossed on its surface. “Something like diamond, and something like iron, bronze if it were better. A fantasy material, forged by any number of means depending on who you ask.”

“A monster killer,” I concluded, readying myself as best I could. The old man sighed.

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Or perhaps it’s wishful thinking. Either way-”

Without looking at me, Aristotle pulled a clay jug from his rags and tossed it at my face. It had no cover but it didn’t spill over when I caught it. The contents were too thick.

“Drink,” he said. I swallowed it down laboriously, spooning it out with my fingers rather than wait for it to creep down the sides of the jug. It was almost unbearably sweet, with an underlying bite that I couldn’t identify. I muscled down one mouthful and took a breath to ask him what the point of this was.

Then when I realized that that breath had come easier than the last, I dug my entire hand into the jar and shoveled as much of the amber elixir into my mouth as I could fit.

Elena’s brow furrowed. “Is that-?”

“Oxymel. The boy's lungs are punctured, not torn out of his chest. He’s young and fit enough for time to mend it.”

The Philosopher had influenced that time, somehow through his medicine. Whether it was the ingredients involved or how it had been prepared, He had imbued it with the essence of natural recovery. I felt my body heal itself of its many aches and pains, my ribs and lungs captain among them. It was a process I had gone through in different variations for most of my life, but I felt it happen over the course of seconds rather than days and weeks.

A month of focused recovery, distilled and stored inside a chipped clay jug.

I forced myself to stop as soon as the tight pain in my chest receded to the point where I could properly fight again. I thrust what remained in the jar at the old Philosopher and nodded towards the broken ship.

“Take this to Thon, help him drink it if he can’t-“

“Were you listening to me, boy? You were fit enough to walk away from what you took with broken ribs and punctured lungs, wounds that heal with time. Oxymel can’t remake bone from dust - time won’t compel a heart turned to paste to beat again.”

The jug cracked in my hand. “What will?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“Nectar,” Gyro answered, landing in the middle of us. He caught another wooden blade when Menoeces threw it, panting heavily and gleaming with sweat. He glanced wryly at Elena while he assembled his next absurd blade. “Didn’t take you this long to explain things to me.”

Elena flushed. “We got a bit sidetracked. Stavros was injured, and this old man appeared out of thin air.”

“Aristotle does that,” Gyro confirmed. Scarlet eyes widened.

“Oh my,” she breathed.

“Don’t worry about Thon just yet,” Gyro said to me, rolling his shoulders and dragging his blade through the air experimentally. “In all the world, there are only a few places he’d be better off at than where he is right now.”

“In the ship?” I asked incredulously.

The drakaina struck before I could get an answer, forcing us all to scatter. The monster bristled with all of the wooden blades Gyro had left behind in its flesh, A hazard all their own as the serpent spun and whipped its coils across the beach. And with furious zeal, my brother kept adding more. As fast as Menoeces could make them, first with his nails and then with his teeth once all of those had torn away, Gyro would fasten them to his iron hilt and bury them in the beast.

“Pointless,” Aristotle observed, ducking the serpent’s tail while I dove over it.

“Perhaps,” I echoed him, twisting and cracking my whip. I caught the serpent by the tail and invoked conviction, planting myself in the sand and refusing to be moved. I stopped its motion long enough for Gyro to give it another kiss. The monster screamed in building frustration and whipped its tail into me rather than away from me.

Elena appeared between us and took it on her shield. A ruinous crack rang out alongside the reverberating hum. My heart stuttered in my chest.

“The shield-”

But when the woman from Olympia turned, her shield remained diamond pristine. It was the recoiling tail that was broken, a new crater in the scales leaking ichor where it had struck the scarlet sun.

Elena offered me a hand up. I took it.

“The shield is our best chance. If you won’t lend it to us, then it has to be you that kills these things.”

I rushed back in, invoking principle - a lord may lead that men may follow, but brothers stand side-by-side - to appear at Gyro’s side in the space between breaths. He flashed me a quick grin and dove through the coils, trusting me to cover him. I did, and I called fire to my rope whip to light the way while he planted another thorn in its side.

“I can’t!” Elena called, leaping in and bashing its head away with her shield when it snapped at him. “I was given this to protect, not to kill.”

“Father in Raging fucking Heaven,” I seethed, dashing and diverting what I could from my brother. “What does it matter?!”

“I made a promise!”

“You made a promise,” I repeated, scrambling and kicking up sand as the drakaina rolled nearly overtop of me. “You made a promise. Look at where we are! What is a promise worth right now!?”

“It’s worth a shield,” Elena responded with conviction, raising it against the serpent’s maw.

The monster bit down on peerless adamant and four of its teeth audibly fractured.

“Lord Aetos! I found it!” Menoeces hollered, running full tilt out of the graveyard of ships with a thick beam of wood balanced over one shoulder.

“I knew you would!” Gyro landed beside me, Elena bracing in front of us. Wild blue eyes met mine in the dark, aglow with sourceless light. “It’s time for your final lesson, brother.”

“You’re drawing back the curtain?”

“I am in fact.”

I choked on a laugh, furious and relieved in equal measure. “Good. Any longer and I would have left the theater.” Anargyros Aetos’ teeth flashed in a wicked grin, his bare chest heaving.

“What is the nature of a Hero?” he asked me, while the wailing serpent gathered itself. A recap, then.

“To liberate, and to slay.”

Menoeces heaved the thick beam of wood down at our feet and immediately dropped to his knees, prying at it with another piece of shrapnel. Gyro followed suit, digging his nails into the wood and somehow carving out clean lines as he did it. I knelt and added my own efforts, tearing strips out of the beam alongside the freedman while Gyro trimmed out the finer details.

“How do you slay a monster, Stavros?”

“I already told him,” Aristotle said, abruptly there watching us work over my brother’s shoulder. “There are only stories-”

“Father of Rhetoric whom I have long admired,” Gyro said, turning his steadily brightening eyes up to regard the philosopher. “I wasn’t asking you.”

Aristotle regarded my brother curiously.

“Fine.”

“Boys,” Elena warned us, shifting her sandaled feet. “With haste.”

“Well?” Gyro prompted me.

I nearly repeated everything Aristotle had told me, but instinct stopped me short. I considered it, imagined what my answer would have been before the father of rhetoric took an interest in my oldest brother. What would it have been when I was a boy, when our father was still around to tell us stories of his triumphs and his conquests? Better than that, what would he have answered? The Tyrant Aetos, the man better suited than any of us to say.

I thought back to all the Epics I had heard outside of him, of Perseus and Jason and grand Achilles, of the champion Heracles. How had they done their brutal work? How had our father?

How did a man slay a monster?

“He does it with divine strength, granted by his faceless father. He does it with divine guidance, led by oracles and mystics when the path is unclear. He does it with divine gifts, a sickle sword of adamant granted by the Thunderer. He does it with help. He does it with divine blessing.”

“And now that the gods have turned away from us?” Gyro pressed me. He stood, joining a blade carved from a dead ship’s beam to his broken sword's hilt. “How did our father do it without a shield or sickle sword of adamant? How does any man stand against the bleak midwinter?”

“With reason,” spoke the father of rhetoric.

“With spirit,” suggested the woman with the divine shield.

“With hunger,” declared the newly freed slave.

The drakaina shrieked and tore through the dunes separating us, moonlight gleaming in its scales. Gyro rolled the shoulder of his sword arm, watching it come with shining blue eyes. Waiting for the spark. Waiting for the answer that only I could give him.

Elena caught the spear of its closed mouth on her shield, shouting as it pushed her back into us. Gyro exhaled.

How did we stand against relentless despair? I gave him his answer.

“With courage.”

Sky blue flames erupted behind his eyes, and Anargyros Aetos plunged a blade of carved driftwood through the monster's mouth. Pinned it to the beach and killed its momentum in an instant.

“What!?” Aristotle roared. “How?”

My brother twisted at the waist and tossed the serpent that swallowed ships clear across the beach, those blue flames spilling out from behind his eyes, and he leapt after it with force enough to rock the entire island beneath our feet. I called upon conviction, invoked the principle that allowed me to stand by any of my brothers with speed no philosopher could match.

And it wasn’t fast enough to catch up to him.

“Why did we build the Eos, brother?” Anargyros asked, slamming into the serpent's side and lashing his driftwood blade across its hide. Pristine silver scales that had weathered bronze and iron without a scratch now shattered and tore apart, molten ichor spewing out of the gouge left behind and not stopping.

“To sail it together!” I caught up just in time to whip my rigging rope around its maw, shifting its head just long enough for the driftwood blade to open another trench in its side. The serpent screamed through its teeth in our mother’s voice and I yanked the line so hard it snapped.

“Yes, but no!” Anargyros struck it again, carving away a patch of flesh and revealing monstrous pulsating organs beneath coal black ribs. “From another angle- why did the kyrios of the Raging Heaven let an Oracle leave his city before she was properly anointed?”

I sucked in a breath.

“She’s-?”

“Further, why would he send her out with only her sister to protect her? Why would he give them nectar and ambrosia and a shield sent from heaven when he couldn’t be bothered to give them a proper crew?”

“Her sister?”

I waded through thrashing coils that I wanted desperately to believe were death throes, breathed deeply of air that was thick with promise and the presence of something else that hadn’t been on this island before but suddenly was. I felt my brother's pneuma on my skin, rising and continuing to rise. It spilled out of him in a torrent without end.

I found Elena fighting through it beside me, her shield glowing like a bonfire as the light from his eyes spilled across its surface. I tried to speak to her but couldn’t form the words. I tried to use my Sophic tongue, but the rhetoric was swept away by the currents of my brother's blazing soul. So I waited for her to look, and silently mouthed it instead.

Where?

Her eyes flickered back to the ship. The one she’d been hiding in when we first arrived, and the one she’d been returning to throughout the fight. Standing guard.

Anargyros drove the drakaina down into the beach as if it was nothing but a garden snake, and no matter how many furrows he tore into his flesh, his driftwood blade didn’t once break. Didn’t even chip.

“Why wouldn’t he tell the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn what he wanted us to find, to fight, to rescue and preserve?” He stomped the monster deeper into the sand with each word, blue flames flashing in time with the blows. “Why would he keep it a secret, when it would make the odds of rescue so much worse?”

I finally found my voice, hollering into the wind, “I don’t know!”

“You do!” He fired right back, the wings of his influence spreading wide and casting a shadow over us that could not be seen but could be felt. He beat them once, and the winds drove us to our knees. “It’s the same reason we built our ship, brother. It’s the same reason we burnt our hearts and souls into its bones. It’s exactly that same reason why I chose to fight with carved wood when iron failed me.”

“For the aesthetic?” I asked as much as answered, unable to believe it as it left my mouth.

“Closer. Are you surprised?” He asked, striding down the length of the serpent like it was polished marble tile. “Did you think Damon and I were being metaphorical? Aristotle surely did. It’s why he’ll be a Philosopher until the day he dies.”

My brother planted his foot on the serpent's jaw and forced it shut, and only then did I realize that it had been screaming in agony while he spoke. Somehow, I hadn’t heard it at all.

“This island is a graveyard, have you realized it yet?” he asked, flicking his driftwood blade to the side and scattering the molten ichor from its surface. “This whirlpool is the work of a creature beneath the sea, drinking the Ionian dry and devouring any unfortunate soul caught in her current. She was chained in place once, but not anymore. Now Charybdis roams.

“There are broken ships scattered all over these shores, just out of sight in the dark. If you had been looking closely when Damon lit the place up with his arrows, you would have seen it,” he winked at me, half the light in the world vanishing and reappearing when he did it. “These monsters are ship wreckers. Worse than that, they’re maneaters.

“I couldn’t find the bones because they’d devoured them all, but the ship worked just as well. Monsters broke these ships, battered them with their bodies and dashed them against the rocks. Now we return that unkindness to them.”

He raised his curved driftwood blade, carved from the one part of the broken ship that Menoeces had been searching for all along. The portion bearing its name.

Nychi. The Talon.

“A hero is the shield just as he is the sickle blade,” he promised us from up above. “Virtue is all he needs to do his work. Even if the stars fell out of the sky and even if the glories of the world all ceased to be, I’d face the chaos that remained with fortitude in my soul. Adamant.”

“Courage,” whispered a voice unlike any other. A woman of formless light, a crown of stars revolving around her head as she embraced my brother from behind. “Courage, until the work is done.”

Anargyros Aetos drove his talon through the drakaina’s skull, and every single wooden blade that he had left jutting out of its body shivered and plunged through into its body in the same motion. Ichor erupted from every wound, and it burned. The serpent with a woman’s voice jerked once, its entire body shivering, and fell limp into the sand.

“Heroes from the golden age and cultivators of virtue as we know them today,” the Hero Anargyros broke the deafening silence that followed. He tilted his head back, gazing up at the night sky, or perhaps at the celestial woman pressing her forehead to his. “We’re no different in the end. We’re all reaching up hopelessly. Foolishly. Courageously. Hoping someone will reach down and take our hand, though we’ll never admit it. Hoping they’ll pull us up to heaven with them.”

“Appealing to higher power,” I realized the true answer. Anargyros smiled brightly, matched by the holy Muse his actions had inspired. The goddess Urania that had lent him her strength.

“Exactly right.”

And lightning struck him from a cloudless sky.

1.65 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

I danced through lashing coils of flesh and lowered my shoulder into the back of Gyro’s man. The lowly Civic cultivator’s head snapped back, but he held stubbornly onto his blade while I hefted him up like a sack of grain without breaking stride. For all the good it did him. What remains of his borrowed blade could hardly be called a dagger - now it was little more than a hilt and a jagged shard of iron the length of my middle finger.

“Lord Aetos!” he gasped, staring upside down at the pained drakaina while I ran. “Wait, I can still fight! I can still-”

“Can’t fight without a weapon,” I told him. “Wouldn’t matter if you had one.”

Thon and I closed the distance in desperate strides. Aristotle, for his part, stepped lightly over thrashing mounds of flesh and somehow outpaced the monster's reach at a walking pace. I kicked up sand just short of Gyro and the shield woman as they dashed out of the graveyard of broken timber beyond the ship. I dumped my brother's freedman onto the beach between us.

I stood tall, snapping the fletching off of Damon’s arrow and pulling the shaft out of my shoulder. Cauterized flesh bled once again. I dispersed the pain and re-sealed both ends of the wound myself with an invocation of virtue’s flame. I met my brother’s eyes resolutely.

“We can kill it.”

“Of course we can, brother,” Gyro said, helping his man up. “How was your swim? Bracing, I hope?”

“To say the least.” I turned to the shield bearer. “Who are you?”

She was tall for a woman of her standing. Muscular enough that her status as a cultivator could not be denied - her shoulders and arms were cut by martial labor, her thighs thickly defined. She wore sandals of white leather that crisscrossed up her ankles and a tattered shawl of white silk that hung from her right shoulder, leaving the left bare so it wouldn’t obstruct her shield.

An unmarred breastplate of fine bronze clung to her like a second skin beneath the shawl, forged to mimic the lines of muscle it guarded. Greaves of the same quality bronze flashed as her stance adjusted and her shawl shifted over her legs. A gossamer of a silver-white thread held the golden braids of her hair in place, paint of the same color accenting curving scarlet eyes. She was regal, and she was strong. She had something we needed.

The woman from Olympia smiled and offered me her hand beneath the shawl, keeping her adamant shield up on her unclothed arm.

“My name is Elena. I’m on a sacred quest, sent from Olympia,” she said graciously, gripping my hand. “Are you as mad as your brother?”

“You’ll have to narrow it down.”

Elena laughed, clear and bright. “There are more of you?”

“Four in all,” Gyro said, dumping onto the sands a bundle of wooden shrapnel he’d gathered from the ship’s remains and taking his broken sword to one of the planks. “Our father vowed to stop at three sons if he wasn’t granted a daughter by then, so of course the heavens punished him with a set of twins. This is one of two.”

“Stavros,” I said. It was likely just the night air and my dip into the Ionian depths, but her skin felt oddly warm. I let her hand go. “The beautiful man on the other side of the beach is my twin, Fotios.”

She smirked. “I see. And where’s the fourth?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We didn’t make it that far down.”

That scarlet gaze swept over me, eyes a color I had - seen burning, one gazing up from the eastern range while the other glared within the depths of the western mountains - never seen in my living memory. Elena took a note of how drenched I was. She looked past me, at the serpent with a woman’s upper body dragging itself onto the beach while my twin danced around it with his flaming whip, and beyond to the whirlpool rising up around the island like an upended dome. It didn’t take her long to make the connection.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she told me with sad sympathy, while she laid her calloused hand on Gyro’s shoulder.

“Don’t be,” I told her. “Not yet. He’s in a bad spot, but he’s not gone. It was Damon that saved us.”

“I was wondering how you got yourself shot fighting a snake,” Gyro said, fierce joy in the dimpling of his cheeks. He carved away at his plank of wood with deft motions, somehow cutting clean edges despite his broken blade more closely resembling a saw. “Damon always said he could hit any target he wanted, even blind or underwater. Seems he was right.”

“Stavros,” Thon said urgently. He pressed his back to mine, raising his borrowed iron in an amateur’s grip. Boxing had always been his strong suit. “It’s shaking itself off.”

He wasn’t wrong - the keening of the drakaina’s feminine voice was tapering off. It would be on us again soon, and I still had to secure our proper tool.

“And you are?” Elena asked the ugly freedman at my back, pleasantly uncaring of the rallying threat.

“His name is Thon,” I said, brusquely cutting short any possible back and forth. Then, before she could ask, “and this is-“ I stopped short, frowning at Gyro’s blood-hungry man. What was his name again?

“Menoeces, Lord Aetos.”

“Call him Stavros,” Gyro said, elbowing me in my side. “Better yet, call him a bastard for not bothering to know your name.”

“He was a slave just a few hours ago,” I protested. Damn it, no, we didn’t have time for this.

“Even slaves have names, brother. They’re still men like you and I. The only thing that separates us from them is a handful of gold.”

“You’re a kind slaver, are you?” Elena's eyes were measuring.

“The kindest there is,” Menoeces firmly agreed. Gyro only hummed and reached into a fold in his chiton.

“A kind slaver,” he mused. “I wonder if anyone can claim that title.” From the fold in his logic, he pulled a wineskin and drank deeply from it before tossing it to Menoeces. “Quick, while there’s time. Get some courage in you.”

The newly freed slave drank sparingly from it and handed it over to me. I passed it over my shoulder to Thon before taking my own swift pull. The kykeon was sweet and alight with cinnamon and clove, burning pleasantly down my throat and returning warm vitality to my flesh. I offered it to the shield woman last.

“Thank you, but I don’t drink.”

“At all?” Gyro raised an eyebrow, shaving one last strip of wood from the plank. Was that…?

“I hear things when I drink,” Elena said abashedly. “So I try to avoid it when I can. It was a gift from my mother, I’m afraid-”

Her expression hardened in an instant and she lunged past us just as Thon cried warning and the cascading sound of parting sands gave away the threat. I turned and saw Elena raise her shield, strapped to her left forearm while her right arm braced it. This time it wasn’t violent noise she was blocking, but the serpent entire.

The drakaina’s narrow head rammed into the adamant shield and the same reverberating sound as before rippled out from the point of impact. The woman from Olympia was thrown back, digging up clouds of sand as she doggedly kept her feet. The monster reared up and spread wide its jaw and its dark hoods of skins, wailing.

“I WANT TO LO-”

A line of vibrant light whipped up and encircled its upper jaw, and I yanked its mouth shut again. The line of rigging rope that I had reclaimed while rushing to rejoin my brother thrummed ominously in my grip - even with my pneuma and myriad truths reinforcing it, this was rope better suited to wrangling a goat than a monster. The serpent bucked, nearly pulling me off my feet. Thon, Gyro, and Menoeces grabbed on and dragged me back down.

“Elena!” I shouted.

“I’m coming!” The shield woman stomped hurriedly out of the sand, having been hammered down nearly waist-deep.

The drakaina assaulted our ears again, no less unsettling with its mouth shut- moreso, if anything. I snarled and banished the memory of my mother screaming through clenched teeth over our father’s grave. Obnoxious fucking snake.

“No time! Pass the shield!”

“Out of the question!”

“Whore of three cities-” I was cut off by Gyro shifting his grip around my waist and tackling me out of the way just as the monster shifted its efforts and lunged down into us. Thon and Menoeces scattered, the latter throwing what remained of his blade at its liquid black eyes and missing horribly.

We made space, the whirlpool precariously close behind. I cracked the rope and whipped the eye Menoeces had been aiming for, bursting it like a rotten fig for all the good it did. Translucent eyelids folded over the wound, three of them in all, and when they retracted the eye was whole again.

“Living is out of the question!?” I shouted furiously. “That shield’s our only chance! Did Bakkhos send you here to die!?” On the other side of the monster, bracing herself in front of the gutted ship, she shook her head.

“Of course not!”

“Then give it here!”

“I refuse!”

I yelled in wordless frustration and surged forward to catch the drakaina’s whipping tail. It slammed into my gut, driving the air from my lungs and shattering at least three of my ribs. Even at its thinning tip I couldn’t join my hands around it, could barely get a grip at all. The monster undulated, and I knew it was going to toss me back into the whirlpool. I emptied my pneumatic chambers and called upon conviction -

A good man is a mountain once he’s planted his feet.

-and held it in place. The serpent whipped its entire body around trying to throw me, broke another rib and drove me to the very edge of the rocks separating the island from the riptide. But my principle lessened the magnitude of its strength, and it lessened my motion in turn. For just a moment, the monster couldn’t shake me.

Gyro seized the opportunity, striking it from the side and burying what remained of his sword in one of the gaps between its cratered scales. His pneuma spiked and the hilt in his hand glowed cherry red. The monster cried out, flames spewing from its vile mouth as Gyro used his sword as a conduit to flood its innards with searing heat.

He leapt off with nothing but a glowing hilt, what remained of the blade oozing out of the wound in molten rivulets. I threw the serpent’s tail aside at the same moment and ran, muscling down the worst of my broken ribs and refilling my pneumatic chambers with the agony. I slid under the monster as it whipped back around and tried to knock my head off my shoulders. Beneath the fractured silver glow, I saw Thon leap forward with his sword raised high above his head. I saw him bring it down with everything he had.

The sword broke apart on the serpent's hide. The tail continued forward and struck him in the gut. I saw in the clarity of silver light the way his eyes bulged, the blood that sprayed out of his mouth. Then he was gone, slamming through the gutted frame of Elena’s ship faster than my eyes could track him.

At that moment, it ceased to be a question of if. Faceless divinity had cursed these creatures to live forever. The Fates had made them impervious to death by mortal means. Even the Father of Rhetoric had declared them an impossible threat to overcome.

As if any of that mattered. These abominations had laid their vile flesh on what was mine. Glory at the peak or shame in distant Tartarus - whatever followed, the result would be the same.

I would see it done.

“If you won’t give me the shield, I’ll take it,” I promised the woman from Olympia. I leveraged the full weight of my influence against hers, a captain against a junior that had only taken a few steps into the Sophic realm. Elena tensed, halfway back to the ship that Thon had disappeared inside, and turned her shield towards me.

“You’ll try, cultivator,” she grimly replied.

Gyro landed between us, eyes on the monster while he pulled his carved plank of wood from the sand where he’d planted it.

“This isn’t a fight we can afford to have right now, brother,” he told me. I rose up on one knee, swallowing back blood. It was difficult to breathe.

“You don’t understand-”

“Elena,” he said, cutting me off. “Explain it to him, as you did to me.”

Then, before my disbelieving eyes, my brother joined a wrecked ship's broken plank to the iron hilt that was all that remained of his sword. He’d carved it into the shape of a wavy blade, with such precision that it looked almost natural joined to the finely wrought hilt. That is, if you ignored the fact that it was made of wood. He tore a strip of scarlet cloth from his cult attire and wrapped it around the point where it would meet iron. He met my incredulous stare with a wink and exploded up into the air.

1.64 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

The Raging Heaven had called for aid in Olympia’s name, demanding a resource that only institutions of greater mystery could hope to provide. I had wondered, when pirates were the greatest threat in my consideration, what cargo was worth the Riotous Tyrant's attention. Then, when a woman’s cries and a monster's flesh had erupted from the whirlpool currents, I had wondered what cargo could possibly be worth the risk.

The woman charging on my brother's heels reared back and let fly her javelin, a Philosopher's pneuma rising up around her. The lance struck the drakaina in one of its glossy black eyes and punched clean through. Thin, watery ichor sprayed from the wound.

The monster rolled, burying the upper half of its narrow skull in the sands - in the same motion releasing every ounce of breath it had stolen while crossing the beach.

The woman grabbed Gyro by the back of his sword belt and yanked him behind her, digging her feet into the sand and raising her red sun shield.

The monster screamed.

“I WANT TO LIVE!”

The crude attack, violence in shrill sound, struck the woman’s shield and rebounded off its surface. It struck back at the screamer, and though the serpent had no means of hearing that I could see, it flinched and flung every coil of itself back.

Gyro took the opportunity for what it was, and I called upon the strength of conviction to cross the distance between us. I immersed myself in an ideal- a principle that I had internalized as a philosopher and followed faithfully ever since.

A lord may lead that men may follow - but brothers stand side-by-side.

I planted my back foot and pushed off, crossing the wreckage and the woman with her shield in a single bound to land beside my brother. I dispersed my pains with the hunting bird's breath as the force of my movement fractured the bone just under my knee. It wasn’t enough to stagger me, not with my principle raging and Gyro by my side.

He flashed me a grin while we sprinted in synchronicity. “The eyes!”

“Obviously!” I shot back. He laughed.

We jumped at the same time, just as the drakaina thrashed up in pain and disorientation and exposed its eyes once more. Gyro unleashed his own Sophic strength with a shout, burying his blade to the hilt in the monster's good eye. I sailed past its sloping head entirely, cracking my line of rigging rope as I passed and wrapping it around the javelin lodged in its other eye.

[Dawn arrives upon its throne]

The burning light of my mystery faith rushed down the length of the rope and ignited the javelin in an instant, flash boiling the molten ichor oozing from the wound. Not hot enough. That being so, I piled on the truth as I hurtled past.

Flame needs fuel - it hungers like a living thing. Flame needs room to grow - it covets like a living thing, too. Some flames are quenched in water, but others burn even over waves. To kill Greek flame you must contain it. Starve it, like any other ravenous soul. To nurture it is far easier - simply feed it and set it free, beyond your shackling will.

Let it breathe.

If a Philosopher's only strength was his grasp of natural law, then that would be enough. I called upon the truth of tending flame that I’d learned from tutors and practiced with my own hands, and through it I bid the fire boiling the monster’s eye to multiply. Light flashed and the low rushing sound of devouring heat overtook the creature, burning its punctured eye to ash in a split second.

I landed heavily in the sand further down the beach, the rigging rope going taut in my hand and tearing the woman’s javelin free as I went. A second searing flash of light heralded Gyro’s own invocation. I watched him push off its head, back towards the gutted ship, backflipping and landing adroitly beside the woman.

“Magnitude,” Aristotle said, sand spilling down his head and shoulders as he rose inexplicably up out of the beach next to me. This time I only grit my teeth at his sudden presence. “Your rhetoric is crude, but I suppose your foundations are firm enough. Unfortunate, that it won't help you here.”

“You sure about that, elder?” I cracked my impromptu whip again, flinging the javelin back across the beach. It sailed over writhing hills of flesh, the serpent unable to react to it visually and in too much pain to bother even if it could. Gyro caught it out of the air and offered it back to the woman who’d thrown it. She smiled and said something I couldn’t make out over the crashing of beach dunes.

“Maybe you’re right,” I continued, waving a hand at Fotios and the crew as they came charging over. “Maybe a philosopher can only influence the simplest mechanics of this world, and perhaps all that I’ve done is shift the magnitude of a flame. But if that’s enough to blind a monster, how is killing it a leap too far?”

Aristotle sighed, combing sand out of his ragged white beard and shrugging more off of the rags draped over his shoulders. His next words were delivered without any of his prior heat - nothing but a teacher’s worn patience.

“Look, and you may see.”

I rolled my eyes but obliged him, looking at the blind drakaina.

Liquid black eyes stared back at me.

“Impossible,” I spat, and the monster lunged.

Fotios slammed into my side, a diving tackle with force enough to send us both careening over the beach rocks and into the riptide beyond. I felt the whirlpool’s notice, felt it seize us with greedy hands and pull us in. I kicked frantically, pumping my right arm while I gripped Fotios’ shoulder with my left. He did the same, and for all our troubles we only just managed to stay together.

But not escape. We sank and kept sinking, tossed and whipped around the spiraling currents all the while. I had thought the island was the central point, the originator of this grand ocean sink, but I had been wrong. The true source drew us down past the island into the furthest depths, and every truth and conviction my brother and I leveraged wasn’t enough to escape it.

When my lungs had fully depleted and darkness crept across the edges of my mind, I emptied my pneumatic chambers one by one back into my lungs, allowing me to fight on for precious moments. At this depth, there was nothing that a man’s eyes could see. The vertigo of tumbling down a drain and the frigid chill reaching for us from the bottom of the sea were all that could be sensed.

I let go of the vital breath from my third pneumatic chamber, in my panicked delirium imagining that I could see it spill past my lips, precious bubbles rising swiftly out of reach. I began emptying my fourth and final chamber of breath back into my lungs, knowing as I did that it would only last me another minute while fighting the riptide. Two if I was blessed.

Then all of that ceased to matter. Fotios’ hand went slack on my shoulder and the riptide jerked it away - my twin nearly with it. I snarled beneath the sea, wasting precious air, and abandoned fighting the current entirely to wrap both arms around my brother's chest, pinning him back to me.

“Idiot twin,” I spoke in the only voice that could be heard down here, my heart hammering in my chest. “You told me you had four chambers, too.”

“I do.” Even the voice of his soul was weak, distant. “I drained the first one saving you.”

“Is that what you call this? Salvation?” Panic and frustration and a need to keep him lucid drove the words. We spun blindly, falling further into the whirlpool mouth.

“Can’t…”

“Can’t what? Can’t do anything right? Can’t help but be a pain in my ass?”

“Can’t feel my soul, Stav.”

It was said that every man confronts the Fates alone. Though we cultivated virtue alongside our peers in the gymnasiums, though we challenged the rhetoric of our fellow Sophists in the agora, and though we stood together against the whims of both Tyrants and raging heaven, there came a point where every man was forced to choose. Our father had told us as boys to seek the first virtue. Our uncle had told us at his funeral that the first virtue was oneself - that was why he’d let his brother die.

It was a cultivator's nature to stand alone. Who among heaven and earth could judge him for preserving himself above any other, when divinity and endless glory were on the line?

“We can,” Damon had said, while we laid our father to rest. With a quiet anger, one that endured. “And we will.”

I forced my brother’s mouth open and exhaled half of what remained of my soul into his.

Fotios seized, jerking back and grabbing a fist full of my cult attire.

“Bastard!” his rhetoric thundered. “Who said you could die first?”

“Who said you could die alone?” I fired back, every bit as furious.

“Who said your deaths were yours to choose?” a woman’s lilting voice asked, clear beneath the waves despite the fact that it wasn’t spoken through pneuma. Light followed, a dim silver glow, rising impossibly from below.

A woman reached up to us. Her arms were so pale they were nearly translucent, her slim fingers tipped with wicked claws. The woman’s eyes were black and wet, her lips slightly parted. Silver white hair rose around her head like mist on winter waters - and she was completely nude, slender and beautiful from the curves of her hips to the modest lines of muscle in her stomach.

Below that, reflecting a light that had no source beneath the sea, thousands upon thousands of silver scales coiled down into the furthest depths of the Ionian, extending seamlessly from her waist.

The serpent woman reached up while the currents pulled us down, and I readied one last breath before the end. Fotios did the same beside me.

Then in the distant depths, past even the drakaina’s spiraling lengths, a spark of rosy light bloomed.

“Who said you had to die at all?” the voice of Damon’s soul rose up from the bottom of the sea, and that spark of light shot up to us in an instant, grazing a painful line across the serpent woman’s cheek as it passed and slamming through my shoulder.

The impact knocked the last breath out of me and the pain shattered my senses. The whole world seemed to spin around me, the only anchor being my twin’s iron grip on my arm as the arrow continued on its course. Darkness encroached, the arrow boiling the water around us and cauterizing inside of my shoulder. I lost my grip on my senses-

And we exploded out of the water, rising up above the central island until the light abruptly went out of Damon’s arrow and it lost its blistering momentum. The two of us hurtled down without a breath to bolster us.

Thon caught me in his arms, grunting and staggering back a step while Dymas did the same for my twin.

“Stavros!” Thon exclaimed, ugly face contorting in panic. “Are you alright!?”

I gasped, inhaling sweet freedom’s air, arching up and slamming my forehead into his nose. He fell back into the sand bleeding.

“Apologies,” I managed to say, lurching forward and gripping his arm. “I didn’t mean to-“

“‘S alright,” he said, the words slurred by yet another broken nose. He cracked an unsightly smile, blood running down his lips and into his beard. “I've been hit harder.”

I heaved a breathless laugh and we pulled each other to our feet.

“What have we missed?” Fotios asked, standing with Dymas’ help. The freedman pointed wordlessly, a bleak grimace on his face. “Ah.”

The drakaina with a serpent’s body and a woman’s voice pounded down into the beach, its closed mouth like a spear piercing through the island itself. Gyro and the woman from the gutted ship leapt away from it at the last second, our brother lashing at a line of broken crater scales with his sword as he did.

His broken sword.

Gyro’s freedman, the first rank Civic cultivator that had balked the hardest at our venture, swung his own borrowed blade at the monster's dimly glowing scales with wild abandon. Sparks flew up from every strike, shards of iron flying away from the blade with every blow. The man dove and scrambled as if possessed, avoiding thrashing flesh by slimmer margins each time. His pneuma flared wildly all the while.

Even I couldn’t deny it was an impressive sight. It was the sort of valor that every cultivator of virtue claimed to have within themselves, just waiting for the right circumstances to burst forth. But where most played the brave man until it came time to be brave, Gyro’s man had played the coward up until the very end. Until we needed him to be more.

It was inspiring. And it was utterly wasted effort.

“Elder,” I said bleakly, and Aristotle raised an eyebrow from his place now beside me. “Where did its wounds go?”

“I told you already, boy,” he said, resigned. “Mortal means can’t kill what divinity cursed to live forever. You can shoot it with flaming arrows, stab it one thousand times and burn its eyes to ash. It won’t last. These creatures don’t abide by natural law. They don’t abide by anything at all.”

“But it’s been injured before,” Fotios protested. “Someone came before us and battered it, broke its scales and made it vulnerable. Why haven’t those wounds healed if that’s a monster's nature?”

The old philosopher frowned and said nothing.

Across the beach, the woman cried out something and Gyro fell into a deep crouch, dropping his broken sword and linking his hands together. She took two running jumps across the sand and leapt up onto his joined hands. Our brother’s pneuma rose alongside the flexing of his muscles, and he heaved her up into the sky with a shout.

A mound of sand wide enough across to carry a ship bulged underneath her and then exploded as the sea serpent burrowed back up, shrieking at the stars.

“I WANT TO SEE-!”

The woman from Olympia caught it on her shield with a sound like a hammer striking a metal drum, and reflected it back down on the monster once again. The monstrous serpent slammed down into the sand, cratering the beach.

I took a step forward without realizing it. Felt my eyes widen. “You said we lacked the proper souls,” I breathed. “That may still be true. But you also said we lacked the proper tools.”

Gyro caught the woman out of the air, making distance as the drakaina thrashed in miserable agony. Gyro’s man bounded and lunged through the outer scales, hacking his borrowed sword to pieces against its flesh. Thus far, all of our weapons had proven useless in the long term against the creature. Backed by our cultivation, we could stagger it and wound it temporarily with our weapons. The monster would outlast them, though. The woman’s javelin was no different - half of it jutted up from a sand dune beside her gutted ship, broken and abandoned.

But her shield was different.

“What did you mean by the proper tools?” I asked the wise man. I knew he was looking at the same thing I was.

“… in the golden age of heroes, if there was ever such an age at all,” he finally spoke, “it’s said that legendary figures stood against the monsters that haunt humanity with arms and armor forged in divine flame. Unbreakable and unrelenting.

“Adamant,” he said with skeptical reverence, as the scarlet shield’s diamond edges glimmered in the lunar light.

I took off running. Thon followed behind as quickly as he could.

“Stav!” Fotios shouted. “Damon’s still down there!” Frustration and a brother's worry made my heart clench in my chest. But there was nothing for it. The four of us had promised long ago to never let the others stand alone.

“He’s in your hands, Fos!” I shouted, sprinting for Gyro.

I didn’t turn back to look when the seas we had been shot out of erupted. I didn’t hesitate when the geyser rained down on my head, such was the size of it. I left it to Fotios, and trusted him to see the work done.

“Fine then!” Fotios’ pneuma rose, the wings of his influence beating in furious challenge. “Come give me a kiss, you ugly snake bitch!”

“You scarlet sons are all the same,” Aristotle said in exasperation, inexplicably keeping pace with me using only leisurely strides.

I barked a laugh.

“You’re the one who chose to come along,” I reminded the old man. He shook his head, smirking.

“Yes, I suppose I was.”

1.63 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

Bursting from the sea and wailing in a woman’s voice, a monster took the stage. We watched without comprehension as it exploded upward and cast its shadow over the Eos.

Silver scales and coiling flesh that undulated and flexed like nothing I had ever seen in my life. The monster continued to rise, pulling more and more of itself from the comforting veil of opaque waves, and in the light of stars above I saw the scars left by those who came before. Pockmarks and craters in the creature's hide, each a blow that had marked it - for some of them, even broke scales - but never pierced through. None but Damon’s arrow, lodged so deep in a gap between two cratered scales that only its fletching was still visible.

“Give me all your Heroes,” the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had commanded our uncle, provoking a fellow Tyrant and risking greater conflict. And here before me was the reason why.

The creature's narrow, sloping head cracked open, it’s grotesque maw yawning wide. Its eyes, a shimmering liquid black, disappeared entirely behind its gaping mouth. It breathed in and the freedmen among us stumbled and shouted in alarm as the force of its inhalation dragged the Eos towards it. I felt the ship's frame strain like it was my own ribs cracking.

Hundreds of sickle-shaped teeth moved inside the monster's throat, rows of them spiraling down into the black depths of its stomach. They almost seemed to spin, in great, lurching motions, as the monster swallowed down the winds.

Finally it had its fill. The winding silver monster lurched down and closed the final span between us, releasing the breath it had taken as it did. I felt the drums inside my ears burst, a woman’s voice scrambling my senses.

“I WANT-!”

Fotios fell upon it from the top of the mast, howling in terror and defiance, and drove his burning trident down on top of its head. My twin wound over a dozen truths through the spokes of the trident as he fell, focused every ounce of a tenth rank Philosopher’s strength into the blow. The monster’s jaws slammed shut, silencing it.

And my brother’s trident shattered against its scales.

I lurched forward, leaping up while Fotios bounced off the monster's head and flailed for balance in the air. It rolled, the motion eerily sinuous and faster than a creature that size had any right to be. Its mouth opened wide again, poised beneath my brother.

I exhaled sharply.

The hunting bird's breath was a breathing technique passed down through the Aetos family for as long as we’d had our name. A mimicry of the eponymous animal, it required a cultivator to hollow out a portion of their body in the style of an eagle - a chamber that they could store their vital breath within. A mortal man inhaled and exhaled only once each time, but the hunting bird did it twice. Once through its lungs, and a second time through hollow sacks of flesh feeding to the pneumatic channels in its hollow bones.

An eagle had nine such chambers stored within itself, each one a buoying force against the currents of heaven. My mother had told me once that it was the ninth chamber that allowed them to fly. It was why every practitioner of the hunting bird’s breath strove to create those nine chambers within themselves. So that one day we could join them up above. So that one day we could fly.

I had only ever heard stories of distant ancestors managing eight. Maintaining a pneumatic chamber at all as a civic cultivator was a feat worth praising. Maintaining two as a philosopher was similarly impressive. Three for a hero, four to a tyrant. Anything beyond that was prodigious, so said the elders.

I drained all four of my pneumatic chambers and shot up from the ship’s deck with my spear in hand. The first exhale emptied the pneuma from those chambers into the channels I’d painstakingly carved through my bones. Each chamber contained a breath, each breath the culmination of hours and days of dogged exertion. Every pain that I had dispersed evenly throughout them, every ounce of my conviction built upon a thousand everyday actions. The second exhale passed through my lungs, steaming as it shot through my grit teeth.

The hunting bird's breath allowed a man to break apart the trials of his life, to disperse them within himself and minimize their impact. In doing so, it allowed him to make those pains his own. To buoy himself with them as an eagle in flight. And when the time was right, it allowed him to let those pains go all at once, releasing more than any mortal man could hope to take in with a single breath - and it allowed him to fall.

To dive out of the sky with talons spread wide.

That was how an Aetos hunted.

I dove up, exerting the strength of four talons with one thrust of my spear into the monster’s liquid black eye. The impact slammed the creature up and away from my airborne brother, its entire body flinching away from the blow in a cascade of moving coils.

It rounded it on me while I fell back to the deck, holding onto what remained of my spear. I had rocked it, but I’d broken my weapon in the process just like Fotios.

My twin and I hit the deck at the same time, and Gyro was suddenly above us. His blade burned bright for a split second as he leapt, and then it was quenched. Gyro buried it to the hilt in the gap between pockmarked scales

The monster screamed again. I gasped, dispersing the wrenching pain in my ears through four pneumatic chambers. Sprawled out on the deck beside one another, Fotios and I watched, dazed, as the enormous serpent writhed and drew away from the Eos. It dove back into the whirlpool and was gone in an instant.

Fotios’ head lolled sideways, his lips moving silently. As if I could hear him over the whirlpool and the shrill ringing in my ears. I dug a finger into my ear and flicked the blood at his face.

“Did you bring another weapon?” he asked me in the voice of his soul, like a proper Sophic cultivator.

“No,” I responded in kind. He grimaced.

“Gyro is going to be insufferable.”

“And why would that be?” Asked the man himself. He leaned over us, one hand on his hip while the other held a sword covered in molten lead. “What cause would a man carrying four spare swords have to be insufferable to the boys refusing to carry even one?”

“I would have made room for a spare if I knew we’d be fighting monsters.” The voice of my soul seethed.

Gyro scoffed. He offered me a hand. “A man can’t always know when a fight is coming. That’s why you carry it everywhere you go.”

“Consider us humbled,” Fotios said while Gyro yanked me to my feet. “Now will you loan us some arms?”

“I cannot.” Gyro pulled Fotios up and slapped droplets of molten lead off his shoulder, spattered on him by the creature’s wound. ”I gave the last one to Thon.”

“Well enough. I’ll take Dymas-“

“No.” Gyro shook his head with finality. “The freedmen need weapons more than you two.”

“Son of a bitch,” my twin conveyed in a Philosopher's voice, vitriol behind every word. My own mood wasn’t far behind. “Fine, fine! What’s next, then? The snake’s not dead yet - how do we kill it?”

“You can’t.”

I snarled a curse and jerked away from the old man in rags suddenly standing between Fotios and me. The Eos rocked as the whirlpool currents slammed her starboard side, nearly knocking me right back on my ass.

“No! I refuse!” I shouted. “I refuse to believe it! How could you have possibly been here the whole time!?”

Aristotle rolled his eyes, looking for all the world like a man with two feet in the Styx, yet balancing on the roiling deck without any apparent effort. “If you had looked, you might have seen me.”

“What do you mean we can’t kill it?” Fotios demanded. “Stavros and I beat it like a mouthy slave. Damon skewered it and Gyro made it bleed! If it can bleed then it can die-”

“It did not bleed,” Aristotle cut him off, snatching Gyro’s sword arm before any of us could react and dragging it up, forcing him to brandish the blade. “To bleed is to shed blood. What sort of blood looks like this? What sort of blood clings like molten lead to a blade?”

“Ichor,” Gyro answered, watching Aristotle unwrap one of the gray rags from his body and run it down each side of the blade, soaking up the shimmering metallic liquid. He tucked the soiled rag into a fold within his attire when he was done. “It’s a monster after all.”

“I could have told you that,” Fotios said.

“Could you?” Aristotle asked, rounding on him. My twin flinched, taking a step back and nearly falling over Dymas - the man was still flat on the deck, lying prone with his hands over his bleeding ears. “Because it seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this creature is. If I were an unkind man, prone to unkind assumptions, I might even say you had mistaken it for a virtuous beast. That you ascribed the same rules to one as you did the other.”

Another wail bubbled up from the whirling currents. Behind us and away now that the riptide had dragged us further in, but not nearly far enough.

“And if I did?” Fotios demanded. “They are the same, aren’t they? Beasts that grew beyond the natural order. It’s only a question of magnitude that separates them.”

“Wrong!” Aristotle’s rhetoric thundered, threatening to rupture drums that didn’t exist within ears that weren’t corporeal. “They don’t bleed the same blood. They don’t conform to the same rules. A virtuous beast is to an animal what a cultivator is to a man. A monster is something else entirely!”

“We can still kill it,” I said, stubbornly matching him when he rounded on me. “Men have killed monsters before. Why shouldn’t we be able to now?”

“Men have claimed to have killed monsters,” Aristotle stressed, “and then crowned themselves heroes for it. Ancestral warriors and demigods with the ichor of faceless divinity flowing through their veins are said to have killed monsters. I have heard these things, and I have also heard an old man claim to be able to show me a king if I gave him a crown while he defecated in the agora. Would you care to guess how many of these things I have actually seen done?”

“None,” Gyro answered when I refused to.

“None at all. I’ve seen things in the course of my life that would seem stranger and more profound to you than even your bisected corpse god; I have even seen monsters before. But I have never, ever seen a creature that sheds ichor in place of blood die. Have any of you?”

Our silence spoke for us.

“What do you suggest we do?” Gyro asked, his polite neutrality entirely at odds with the chaos raging all around us. As if to punctuate it, the Eos suddenly rolled, catching on a competing current and leaning so far starboard that her sails nearly touched the water.

Aristotle watched us stagger and grab onto whatever portion of the ship was closest at hand to steady ourselves, catching our rattled freedmen by whatever limbs we could before they were tossed fully from the ship.

“Turn back,” he said.

Damon did not hesitate.

“I refuse.”

The Young Aristocrat’s pneuma rose, the eagle head that he had burnt into the Eos lighting up beneath the deck - just as my wing had earlier. Unlike when I had done it, though, my brother invoked it with a purpose. Narrowing his eyes in concentration and rolling his wrist, he reached out for the Eos with his vital breath. The Eos met him halfway.

Against the current and disdaining the momentum that had nearly capsized her, the Eos swung back up to a proper sailing pitch and the groans of her straining frame went silent. The whirlpool still had her, and we were still careening towards that island with its rocks, but it no longer felt as if the ship was about to fly apart any moment.

Gyro whistled appreciatively, though I couldn’t hear it. Fotios and I exchanged a wide-eyed look, seeing the same thought in each others’ eyes - we could do that too. Even the freedmen, still utterly shaken by the monster’s swift entry and exit, regarded the light beneath the steadied deck with awe.

Only Aristotle was unimpressed. “Idiot boy. You’ll kill us all if you go through with this.”

“We’ll die anyway if we come home empty handed.”

“I didn’t say you had to go home,” Aristotle said, irritated. “I said-” he stopped short, turning to glare at me.

No. Turning to glare at the newly freed man I had propped up on my shoulder. Thon’s mouth moved and the veins in his neck bulged as he shouted in my ear as loud as he could, for all the good it did. The only one that could hear him was Aristotle.

The father of rhetoric clicked his tongue and reached for my face. I leaned back, wary -

He snapped his fingers next to my ear.

“-ING ON!? STAVROS!” Thon’s voice came thundering through, nearly deafening me again. Another snap by my left ear before I could react, and the vast rushing roar of the whirlpool inundated me.

“Enough! I hear you!” I snapped. Thon stared at me, ugly face scrunching as he tried to read my lips in the low light. Then Aristotle did to Thon whatever he had done to me, and the rest of the Eos’ crew each in turn.

“What did you do?” Fotios asked, gingerly touching his ears.

“Nothing that nature would not have done itself,” Aristotle said. Clearing Damon’s ears last and snorting at the Young Aristocrat’s appreciative nod, he waved a hand in his usual lecturing gesture. “That is all a philosopher can do. He deals in natural law the way a monger deals in fish. You children enjoy your groups of three, don’t you? Here’s another:

“Magnitude. Motion. Time.” Each word rang like a bell in the air, briefly muffling the outside world. “With experience, through ingenuity, a man can leverage his understanding of natural law to adjust these things in his favor. Your ears would have healed naturally over the course of weeks - all I did was shorten that time. This ship was built well enough to sail naturally through rough waters. Damon only lessened the magnitude of those currents and applied a counter motion to them.”

Another scream. This one angrier than it was pained. And close enough to make my ears ring faintly again.

“What’s your point, elder?” Gyro asked the question we were all hysterically thinking.

“My point is that we do not have the tools required to kill a drakaina, and we don’t have men capable of doing it without them. A philosopher can’t kill what divinity cursed to live forever.”

“You don’t know that,” Damon said with such confidence that I couldn’t help smiling.

“You just haven’t seen it done yet,” Gyro concluded, his pneuma rising in anticipation.

For a blissful moment Aristotle said nothing at all. Crescents of flesh reflecting the light of stars flashed by the port side, the serpent of the sea circling us with ugly intent. The old philosopher sighed.

“I suppose I’ll die, then.”

“You heard the wise man!” I shouted while Fotios rushed across the deck, gathering up as much rigging rope as he could get his hands on. “It’s time to die!”

Thon stood to attention beside me, Dymas and Gyro’s freedman mirroring him. Damon’s man had already joined the Young Aristocrat at the bow and was listening intently as our brother relayed something to him. The drakaina swept past us again, starboard this time, and struck the Eos with some portion of its grotesque body as it passed.

I steadied Thon and accepted a bundle of rope that Fotios tossed my way, breathing deep the salt and thrill in the air. “You smell that, boys? That tang in the air- do you know what it is?”

Thon closed his eyes and breathed in deep.

“Freedom,” he said at once.

“Exactly right.” I set my feet and watched the island hurtle into view. Almost there. “That’s a cultivator’s freedom.”

“And isn’t she sweet?” Fotios jeered.

“Brace!” Gyro called, and we all brandished our weapons in defiance as the serpent reared up on our starboard side. I drained all of my pneumatic chambers again, cracking my line of rigging rope like a whip and igniting it. The drakaina’s sloping head split open, and then its jaw split further on each side, hoods of slick black flesh unfolding like blooming roses.

Disgusting creature. I knew, in a primal place deep within, that this was an entity that did not deserve to exist. And in its passing, the world would be made a brighter place. As cultivators of virtue, what else could we do but see it done?

Resolved and focused in the face of certain death, none of us noticed the second monster until it was too late.

“Damon!” Fotios cried, but too late. Too late.

Ash and cypress shattered and flew apart beneath the coiling scales and clawed fingers of a woman with a serpent’s tail in place of legs. She took the bow of the Eos before any of us could think to move, sent Damon and the ship’s wooden figurehead both plummeting into the sea, and dove in after them with a hateful grimace on her eerily human face.

Then the first monster struck.

The Eos lurched and broke again, the drakaina’s revolting coils spilling onto the deck and crushing whatever they could. Gyro stabbed it again, finding another weak spot left by those that died before us, and the monster sought to deafen us again with its voice. Whatever Aristotle had done for us lingered, though, and I kept my hearing this time. Enough to hear my twin shout.

“Land!” Fotios pointed, and - ah. The island.

I threw Thon over my shoulder and leapt off the deck just before the Eos struck the rocks of the central island's shore. We landed in beach sand and rolled, Thon scrambling after the sword that had flown out of his grip upon landing. I rose up with nothing but a line of rigging rope and bare belligerence, Fotios and the rest of the crewmen coming to their feet alongside me to face the undying threat.

Gyro ran straight past us. Away from the rocks and the monster ravaging our beached ship, towards the gutted ship from Olympia further down the shore. Fotios and I shared a look.

“Go!” he said. I took off after Gyro.

“What are you doing!?” I called, squinting through clouds of sand kicked up by his pounding strides.

“Securing precious cargo!” he replied without stopping, diving headlong into the ship’s gutted frame.

“Now!?” I sprinted past that, into the wreckage that had been thrown from the ship when it was beached. I tore through broken timber and tangled lines of rigging and sail cloth with a furious purpose, looking for anything worth a kyrios’ favor and finding nothing at all.

“Stav!” Fotios’ panicked shout rang clear across the beach, and I spun around to see the reason why spilling out of the whirlpool onto the rocks. The drakaina could swim through sand as well as it could water, and it had ignored the freedmen and my twin entirely in favor of pursuing us. It bore down on us faster than Fotios and the crew could match, the spiraling lines of teeth within its mouth devouring the wind and sands between us.

“Gyro!” I shouted, brandishing my whip.

Gyro lunged out of the landed ship, his sword blazing with the light of the Rosy Dawn and his own dauntless courage.

A young woman came sprinting out after him. She had a javelin in one hand, drawn back to throw, and a shield in the other. The shield was polished bronze. It was embossed with a scarlet sun.

1.62 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Found you,” Damon declared with bone deep satisfaction, and my heart started hammering.

“Freedmen! Maintain the pace!” Gyro stood abruptly up from his bench, snuffing out the unburning flames of virtue that had been coating his oar. Damon was already at the tip of the Eos, one arm draped over the figurehead’s shoulders and the other braced against the rail, both man and wood-carved woman staring out into the abyss.

I threw down my oar and reached into my cult attire - The next statement is true. The previous statement is false. - and pulled from it my spear. Fotios did the same beside me, dispelling the illuminating light clinging to his own oar so he could grab for his trident. In a moment all the lights were gone. What remained was provided by the stars above, the moon rising up to join them -

And the message from Olympia, still pinned to the mast by Damon’s manifested pneuma. Every letter glowing with the rosy light of dawn.

I realized all at once the error in my thinking.

I had accepted as a matter of course that Olympia would have good reason to know a tragedy had taken place, along with where it had taken place. Pirates were working men like any other, if easier to hate. It only made sense that if they had acquired precious cargo they would seek to sell it to the highest bidder. Reaving was a pirate’s virtue and ransom was their path. They would have sent word not just to Olympia, but any of the wealthier prospects in the free Mediterranean and beyond.

Our dock had been empty for days, but there were other ways to send a message. Virtuous beasts that obeyed a man’s will were in high demand no matter where you stood among heaven and earth, but even mundane birds could be trained to carry a message with the proper upbringing. If the barbarians in Rome could manage it with their eagles, it was surely within the capabilities of even the lowest Greek reaver. That Olympia could muster the same resources in delivering their call for aid went without saying.

But that only made sense under the assumption that it had been men that waylaid the ship from Olympia. Otherwise, how could they have known what happened? How else could a message have been sent to notify the Raging Heaven?

“If they had something prepared in advance,” Fotios muttered, leaning over the ship’s rail and brandishing his trident warily at the coal black flames. “A pre-written message in case of the worst…” I realized we had been thinking the exact same thing.

“It wouldn’t have mentioned their location,” I said in a low voice, tensing as a particularly loud wave broke against the hull. “They would have had to amend it on the spot.”

“Not impossible,” my twin reasoned. He didn’t sound convinced.

“Not likely.” I rounded on my elder brothers, pacing up the deck while three freedmen and a slave did their best to make up for the loss in rowing hands. “I have a question.”

“I have an answer,” Damon responded without looking back.

Another agonized scream split the Ionian in two.

“How did Olympia find out about this?”

“The same way we did.”

“That being?”

“Yesterday, just after dawn,” said a winded man behind me. I turned to the freedman that Damon had brought. “The kyrios received a roll of papyrus from a raven made of liquid shadow.”

“Just call it a raven,” I said in irritation. “Not like there are any light ravens left.”

“He wasn’t being artful,” Gyro said idly, rhythmically easing his sword from its sheath before dropping it back into place as he leaned against the rail. A bad habit of his. He only fiddled with his blade like that when he intended to use it.

“A bird made out of shadows?” Fotios queried from across the deck. “Did it talk as well?” His tone was deliberately light, an affectation to combat the tension in the air.

“Yes.”

I stared down at Damon’s freedman.

“My mentor often tells me that the Tyrants across the Ionian are a different breed than what we’ve come to know.” In the low light of the endless shadowed waves, the rings in Damon’s eyes seemed to glow like whirling sun rays. “The kyrios of the Raging Heaven is another level beyond that. And when a man is half a step from heaven, who’s to say he can’t reach into his shadow and pull out a bird to deliver a message for him?”

“What did it say, then?” I asked the freedman, before shaking my head and rounding on my brother. “Damon, what did it say? Enough games. Your slave’s obviously already told you.”

“He’s not a slave anymore.”

“I am going to throw you into the sea,” I threatened him. “You’re worse than Aristotle.”

Damon smirked. “It’s the oldest brother’s duty to irritate his younger brothers.”

“A truth worth advancing for,” Gyro chimed in.

I raised my spear.

The Young Aristocrat brandished his hands in surrender, mirth coloring the words as he answered.

“The raven told our uncle what the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had omitted from his letter in an act of political mercy. The message was brief - ‘lend every heroic soul you have to see this done, or I’ll tear your ancestral tree out by the roots.’”

As if in response, another scream came seething out of the sea spray. Closer now, but how far until we reached it? I glanced around the Eos. At four philosophers, three citizens, and a bonded slave.

“Seems we’re ill equipped.”

“Take heart, brother.” Gyro threw an arm over my shoulder. His blue eyes were bright. “So long as we’re together, we have everything we’ll ever need.”

The Eos dipped.

I staggered, a childhood of sailing and Gyro’s arm around my shoulder preventing me from tumbling over the rail entirely. I heard Fotios curse at the stern and heard Dymas and Thon cry out in alarm as the rowing benches slid out from under them. The sudden roar of rushing water was too loud to be believed. Even in pitch dark I should have noticed it before this moment. I should have heard it. Gyro reached out with his other hand and caught his freedman by the hair as he fell past us

“What is this!?” Fotios shouted.

Damon’s freedman stumbled back towards the stern, walking up an incline as the Eos dipped further down. The man had no sea legs to speak of, but he moved with purpose nonetheless. The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn stood at the front of the ship, arms crossed and perfectly balanced even as it dipped so low that the woman serving as the ship’s figurehead was fully submerged in the Ionian.

Wait. I squinted. No, she should have been beneath the surface of the waves by this point. But she wasn’t. Because the Ionian was dipping to match her.

“Lord Aetos,” Damon’s freedman called from the back of the ship, a parcel of unadorned leather in his arms. The man tossed it down the deck. Damon caught the leather bundle and pulled from it a bow and a quiver of arrows.

“That’s Uncle’s bow.” Somehow, it was all I could think to say.

“He’s going to shatter your ego when we get back,” Fotios called from the stern, hysterical mirth in his voice.

“He’s going to try,” Damon said, and knocked an arrow to the bow string. The Tyrant’s weapon, carved from ancient ash and as broad end-to-end as some men were tall, creaked ominously as he drew it back. I felt the same mad excitement as my twin bubble up in my virtuous heart. Gyro had understood the full scope of Damon‘s plan from the beginning, but it was the nature of older brothers to keep their younger siblings in the dark.

Damon spread wide the wings of his influence and the string of the Tyrant’s bow erupted in scarlet flame. It spread to the arrow, the intensity of the light doubling and re-doubling in the distance between two heartbeats. He leaned back, angling the arrow up to the heavens.

[The dawn breaks]

Thwang.

The arrow shot up into the night sky, illuminating the Ionian for leagues all around us. Behind us there was nothing but the same churning waves we’d been rowing through all day, stretching through the far horizon. But ahead…

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“Freedmen, to arms!” Gyro’s voice rose. He clapped me on the back and turned to climb back up the ship, dragging his freedman along by his hair. He slapped Dymas over the head and pulled Thon from the rail that he was clutching for dear life. “Up with you, rise! You may not be my brothers, and you may not be my juniors, but you’re members of my crew and that’s more than most men can say!

“Stand like you belong on this ship. Rise and fight with us, show us we were right to free you from your chains!” From a fold in his cult attire our brother pulled three swords, each of them a work of art that he had long discarded - blades that hadn’t lasted long in Anargyros Aetos’ hands. “I only have these scraps to offer you now, but once the work is done we’ll find you each a weapon worth wearing on your belt.”

The freedmen caught the blades he tossed their way with varying degrees of poise, but the reverence in their eyes was equal across all three of them. As it should be. What Gyro called scraps, swords weakened and worn beyond his ability to repair them, were priceless artifacts by the standard of any common philosopher- let alone a citizen that had gone to bed the previous night a slave. I watched those blades alone give each man strength, courage in the face of what lay ahead.

It was one thing to cast off your chains and take an unfettered breath for the first time in years. It was one thing to sail alongside young philosophers of the aristoi, one thing to call them by their given names as if you were equals. But all of that was within the scope of a slave’s life, and a lack of iron chains did not necessarily make a man free. What was entirely another thing was to stand and fight beside those philosophers that had once been your masters, entirely another thing to wield a cultivator’s blade and not just whatever was at hand.

I laughed harder as the Eos rode down into the currents of a whirlpool large enough to swallow the Scarlet City whole. Pulling us all, unerringly, towards a central point that could just barely be seen in the distance. Damon’s shining arrow illuminated the island at its center briefly as it flew overhead, along with the ship gutted and shattered on its shore.

“Fine then!” I slammed the butt of my spear to the deck, and beneath the deck the ship’s bones lit up at my pneuma’s touch. The light spilled up through the seams of the deck, bathing me in the glow of my conviction.

“You want to teach me a lesson!?” I demanded of my brothers as the Eos fell into the sea. “This lowly sophist awaits your wisdom!”

Infuriating bastards. They had let me put on such a show before, not once interrupting to give me the greater context of what was to come. Philosophers could exchange discourse without a citizen ever being the wiser - it wasn’t consideration for the freedmen that had held their tongues. No, I knew better than to think so favorably of them.

“I have no idea what you mean, brother,” Damon said lightly, pulling another arrow from his quiver.

“Even if we did, does this really strike you as the proper time?” Gyro added, serious words betrayed by the creasing of his eyes.

Damon and Anargyros Aetos were as identical in spirit as Stavros and Fotios Aetos were in flesh. Wherever they went and whatever it was they were doing, neither could be satisfied unless they were putting on a show. Any playwright worth their title knew that even the cleverest comedy went to waste if there was no one there to laugh - even the most gut-wrenching tragedy was worthless if there was no one there to weep for it. Unfortunately for Fotios and I, that meant we were the audience. We called it our fraternal tribulation. Our earned consequence for having the audacity to be born so beautiful not just once, but twice.

Regardless. They had set me up, and I had fallen into it. Nothing for it now but to take account of it.

“Yes,” I declared. “This strikes me as exactly the right time.”

Thon hissed in helpless frustration while the vast whirlpools currents wrenched us sideways, sending him staggering. He reached for the ship’s rail but stopped himself at the last moment. Gyro had told him to stand, and so he stood. He looked like half a corpse already, the only one of us that had been forced to row through the day and into the night without the bracing vitality of a cultivator’s breath. He didn’t take his eyes off his unsteady feet even as I stepped up to him and loomed, so absorbed in maintaining his balance.

He did look up when I placed a hand on his heaving chest and shoved him off his feet.

“What- Lord Aetos?”

“I told you to call me Stavros,” I said, invoking another fold in logic and pulling a fine leather pouch from my cult attire.

“But,” he hesitated, visibly thrown. The whites of his eyes stood out starkly as he took in our current situation. We were deep enough into the whirlpool now that the Ionian seemed to rise up around us like the mountain ranges around the Scarlet City.

“But?” I prompted him sharply, rapping my spear against the deck.

“It isn’t Kronia anymore!” he blurted. “I’m just a slave again!”

“I suppose that’s true,” I said, and dumped the leather purse out into his lap. Golden drachma and other coins of silver and bronze, dozens of them, rained down into his hastily cupped palms until they spilled over the sides. Thon stared at the riches in his hands, more wealth than he had held in the entirety of his life up until now.

“What is this?” he asked, a hitch in his voice.

“Helping me find the best timber for my ship on the one day of the year you didn’t have to was a kindness,” I told him. “But it fell within the boundaries of a favor. Dragging you onto this ship and telling you to match my pace was a cruelty, but one within the scope of a slave’s duties.”

Damon let fly another shining arrow, lighting up the night and showing us just how far we had fallen into the tide. The island at the center of it all still seemed impossibly far away, and yet the waves around us kept growing higher. Fotios hollered down approximate distances, having climbed the mast for a better viewpoint.

“If we were chasing pirates, I wouldn’t give you a single lepton for your troubles,” I told him frankly. “But it’s clear to me now that this isn’t slave work. And if that’s the case, I have no choice but to pay you for your service.”

“I… I don’t…” Thon couldn’t seem to decide what was more pressing. The ravenous whirlpool, the cultivators taking up arms all across the ship as if they were going to strike down the Ionian itself, or- “I don’t have a place to put all this.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled a slow breath. On the other side of the deck, Gyro tried and failed to muffle a snort. It wasn’t his fault. This once, in these circumstances, I would let it go.

“That is a problem,” I agreed, opening my eyes to regard the ugly slave with the often broken nose. “Why don’t I hold onto it for you? Better yet, I can sell you something for it.” Common sense finally overcame panicked vertigo, and his hope bloomed once again. Thon cleared his throat, salvaging what pride he could.

“My freedom?”

“If you’d like. Seems you have just enough to cover it.”

Thon counted out every last coin while we wound a hurtling path down to the bleak rocks of the central island. Once the last golden drachma dropped into my leather pouch, I tucked it back into my cult attire and took his manacles in hand. The dawn burned through them, weakened them until even a mortal man could tear them off. Thon did just that.

The ugly freedman took his first unfettered breath, and Gyro promptly tossed him his fourth and final spare. Thon rose on steadier feet than before, his grip on the sword unfamiliar but strong.

“Stavros,” he greeted me as an equal. Met my eyes as a free man. I scoffed and punched his shoulder.

“Thon. Let’s see if you’re worth the money.”

“You know, I think you were right after all,” Gyro exclaimed, smiling brightly even as the Eos rolled and nearly capsized us. “This is the perfect time for a lesson.”

“Let’s hear it then!” Fotios hollered down from the top of the mast. “I might as well die wise!”

The rush of air that accompanied every use of the Tyrant’s bow was almost a blow by itself, a swift boxing of the ears. Damon watched the third arrow blaze a trail through the sky and just barely clear the lip of the whirlpool above.

“What is a hero?” he asked.

I braced myself with my spear in hand, pneuma rising. “You’re about to tell us.”

Damon pulled the fourth arrow from its quiver and knocked it to our uncle’s stolen bow, leaning so far back that the arrowhead was pointed nearly straight up. At this point, it was all but impossible that it would clear the rim. We were too far down.

“A hero is a breaker of chains,” Gyro said, drawing his sword fully from its sheath and planting his right foot up on the rail. “A liberator of men.”

The string of the Tyrant’s bow and the arrow knocked to it ignited in scarlet flame. Damon let it build, let it overflow, until it had banished every shadow on the ship. Thon set his feet beside me, his shoulder pressed to mine. Fotios’ freedman stood beneath the sail and watched my twin, ready to catch him if he fell, and our older brothers’ additions to the crew flanked them on either side.

“What else?” I asked, though I already knew. I inhaled sharply and drew my principles around me like a cloak - like armor.

“A hero,” Damon said with heavy intent, “is a slayer of monsters.”

He turned abruptly, taking aim at the sea and loosing his nova arrow. The shaft of riotous light punched through the waves in an explosion of steam and boiling water, and it continued on without dying out. An unmistakable guiding light piercing down, down, into the dark-

And finding its mark.

The light slammed through flesh within the depths and went out. A woman’s shrill, agonized shriek bubbled up out of the waves.

“Come, then,” the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn commanded, his pneuma blanketing the Eos. His lips drew back from his teeth, his voice rising to match a sudden wild grin. “Rise!” he shouted, and we, his brothers, roared along with him.

“Rise and greet the dawn!”

The monster did just that, scales of shifting silver exploding up out of the sea.

1.61 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Lord Aetos-”

“Call me Anarygyros! Or Gyro if there isn’t time,” Gyro said, cutting off the slave he had brought along and freed.

“Lord Anargyros,” the freedman amended, to our brother’s exasperation. “I don’t think this is wise.” The man was doing his best to maintain the pace, though he was struggling nearly as much as Thon in his chains.

Through good fortune or shrewd attention, Damon and Fotios had both taken on slaves with prior experience in cultivation. Damon’s slave, now freedman, leveraged the pneuma of a fourth rank Citizen as he rowed - a notable achievement for a man that had spent his adult life shackled and suppressed. My twin’s slave was even more impressive, somehow having reached the seventh rank of the Civic realm before the Rosy Dawn had bound him body and soul. I had never cared to know the man’s story before today, but I resolved to ask Fotios about it when this was over.

In contrast to his fellow freedmen, Gyro’s companion had been enslaved young. He did what he could with the strength his vital breath provided, but the distance between a man that didn’t know his place in the world and an untrained citizen of the first rank wasn’t all that vast in many ways. Though it was infinite in others.

He was able to keep pace with the freedman Damon had brought, but it was clear to see the effort it took him. If things kept on the way they had thus far, he might be the first to collapse - even before Thon.

Even so, he mustered up the breath to speak, and the courage to challenge the young pillars of the Rosy Dawn on top of that. I wouldn’t forgive him for laughing at me earlier, but I could at least respect what it took for a sophist at the foot of the mountain to challenge a group of men half a step from the realm of legend and epic.

“Which portion of this isn’t wise, Brasus?” Gyro asked gaily, tilting his head back to regard the man as he rowed. “The portion where my good older brother abandoned all his duties as the Young Aristocrat for days without warning? Perhaps the portion where we used a holy day of festivities as an excuse to gather materials and men? Or is it the portion where we built a ship without the permission of either kyrios and sailed it into danger when our uncle demanded our presence?”

“All of those things! But especially the last one!” the freedman wheezed and ducked his head into his shoulder, scrubbing the sweat from his eyes as best he could without letting go of his oar. “Your uncle will be furious. Worse than that, if the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk decide to come together to answer Olympia’s call, and Yianni Scala discovers you took a ship alone that his initiates could have shared-”

“We did no such thing,” Damon said, and then, as an afterthought, “Pull.”

It was impossible to tell whether Gyro’s freedman was gasping like a landed fish at the exertion or at the thought of directly disagreeing with the Young Aristocrat.

“I beg the Young Aristocrat,” he finally decided. “Explain it so this one can understand. How is that so?”

“We didn’t take a ship that Scala could have used,” Damon explained, the muscles of his shoulders and arms flexing smoothly as he worked his oar. Somehow, he wasn’t sweating at all. “Unfortunately for the Burning Dusk, there wasn’t a single vessel that would take them. Those that should have been were pushed off their courses by the crisis we’re sailing for.”

“But the Eos,” Gyro’s freedman pressed in frustration. “They could have used the Eos!”

“What gave you that idea?” Gyro asked. His freedman stared at his back, lost for words.

“The hands of Stavros Aetos pulled from their roots the trees that served as timber for this ship,” Damon went on, his voice carrying easily through the wind and the crashing of waves slapping at the hull. “The hands of Fotios Aetos wove the sun stained cloth that catches the wind and drives the ship forward. The hand and the blade of Anargyros Aetos cut these materials to size, refined them to their current state.”

“And the hands of Damon Aetos designed it all,” Gyro finished, kicking our eldest brother’s knee with a fond smile. Damon smirked faintly.

“This ship was built by filial sons,” he said, the concentric circles ringing his pupils almost too bright to look at as he turned to regard us all. “By the young generation of the Aetos, for the young generation of the Aetos. Her name is Eos, and she would sink herself before she carried the weight of the Burning Dusk Cult.”

“Aye!” Fotios crowed, while I stomped my feet against the deck in agreement.

“But that’s…” Gyros freedman bit his lip until it bled, unable to go on.

“That’s tempting the fates,” Damon’s freedman said, his first words outside of calls to pull. The fourth rank Civic cultivator met our eldest brother’s eyes squarely, unafraid. “The Young Aristocrat knows that better than any of us. He knows that his uncle would have you all whipped and confined to the estates for this. He knows that if Yianni Scala finds out, the Tyrant will shatter his ego along with his brothers’. And he knows that if the kyrios of the Burning Dusk Cult ever heard what he just said-”

“He would kill us all, and make our uncle thank him for the privilege.” Damon nodded. “I know.”

“Then why?” Gyro’s freedman asked helplessly. Fotios and I exchanged a look. Mingling with genuine concern for the man that had broken his chains, there was also fear for himself. We young pillars knew what was at stake. That our crew would share our punishment went without saying. “Why go about it this way? You know what they’ll do when you return.”

“I know what they’ll try.”

My twin and I chuckled at the look on the freedman’’s face.

“A Tyrant is only a man,” Gyro said, like a prayer.

“A Tyrant’s existence is no different from ours,” Damon agreed. “Only more, for better and for worse. A Tyrant in their domain might seem to be a god, but that doesn’t make it true. The kyrioi of the Scarlet City can be opposed. They can be maneuvered against. And they are still fallible - to greed, to pride, and to fear. Do you know what a Tyrant fears more than any distant divinity or thunderous tribulation?”

The sun dipped fully past the horizon, the silver glow of thousands upon thousands of stars above casting dim shadows across the deck.

The glow of Damon’s eyes washed out all other color.

“A tyrant fears subjugation.”

“But subjugation is a Tyrant’s trade, brother,” Gyro objected, puzzled. “Who subjugates the subjugator?”

“Who enslaves the enslaver?” Fotios echoed, laughing silently at the way the freedman jolted on his bench.

“Has to be a bigger fish,” I joined in. As one, on an unspoken signal, the four of us called up the Rosy Fingers of Dawn. The light spread across each of our oars, Hissing and throwing up steam where the paddles dipped into the Ionian. The oars didn’t burn, of course. Even I had finer control than that.

“A Tyrant fears the world outside of their domain.” Damon ran a hand through wild brown hair, gazing distantly at the shadowed horizon ahead. “Even more than that, they fear the world inside of a greater Tyrant’s authority.”

With a negligent hand, the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn pulled from a fold in his attire and threw over his shoulder the roll of papyrus sent from Olympia. It tumbled and unfurled in the air, headed over the edge of the ship. But as it passed the beam from which the sale hung, a thin lance of rosy light struck and nailed it to the mast. Damon flicked his middle finger again, and another shaft of light nailed down the bottom edge of the papyrus.

“The city of Olympia has issued a cry for help,” Damon said, repeating what we already knew from the contents of the message. “There are ravenous creatures in the Ionian, and one of them has decided to put its hunger before common sense. The docks that connect Alikos to the free Mediterranean have been empty for days because of it.”

It was a detail I hadn’t noticed until Gyro pointed it out, to my chagrin. It wasn’t uncommon for the docks to be empty during certain seasons, given most sea captains preferred the lavish dark towns of the Alabaster Isles or the city of Olympia over our own bare beaches. It was, however, uncommon for them to be empty in the days leading up to Kronia. Damon had noticed, and he had either assumed something outrageous because of it, or he put more stock in his gut than I thought he did.

“The Half-Step City doesn’t take kindly to pirates, but they also don’t care enough to chase them out of the seas,” Gyro chimed in. “So long as it isn’t their ships being sunk, it’s largely a colonial concern.”

“Unfortunately, they had lost a ship in the end.”

“Now that they’ve lost one of their charters, the kyrios of the Raging Heaven is concerned.”

Damon curled the fingers of his left hand, his influence brushing over the deck and seizing upon the two shafts of light pinning Olympia’s missive in place. At once, both constructs of lights began to melt like candle wax, the one at the bottom melting up in defiance of common sense. The trails of liquid light bent and curved as they trailed up and down the papyrus, eventually meeting in the middle, having outlined every letter of the message. The call for help glowed in the night, every word of it. 

Including the name signed at the bottom.

Bakkhos

“It’s been over a century since the first son to burn was torn down from his throne and dragged across the Ionian,” Damon continued. “Long before any of us were born. But not nearly long enough for the Burning Dusk or our own Rosy Dawn to forget it.”

“You can’t possibly- you intend to turn them against each other?” Gyro’s freedman of the first Civic rank asked, aghast. “Are you mad?”

My pneuma rose along with Fotios’ beside me. Dymas and Thon froze in their rowing, not daring to even breath despite their bodys’ demands for it. Gyro winced, and the fool’s blood drained from his face as he realized what he’d just said.

“I beg the Young Aristocrat-”

“Mad,” Damon mused, as we all but flew across the Ionian with nothing but the stars to guide us. “What do you think, brother?”

Gyro hummed. “I think insanity is your virtue, brother.”

“And am I a virtuous man?” Damon asked, amused.

“More than any other I know.”

“It’s part of your charm, brother,” I added. Fotios grunted in firm agreement, still glaring at the back of the lowly freedman’s head.

“A wise man in filthy rags once told me something,” the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn said, contemplative. “I’ve carried it with me ever since.”

“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”

It was a principle that he lived by. One of his ten as a captain of the Sophic Realm. Unmistakable once described, just as mine had been.

The freedman’s shoulders hunched. His hands tremored as they gripped his oar. “I understand,” he whispered.

“So you do. What I’m suggesting, then, is that the man that gathers Tyrants the way Tyrants gather Philosophers is a man worth knowing. Though I can’t say it with certainty, I am saying that stories paint him as an amiable man when things go his way, and as someone who is gracious when accepting favors - and generous when returning them.”

“You think he would oppose two Tyrants in their domains for this?” I asked, honestly curious. “Even if we find the goods and the pirates responsible, there’s no guarantee that they kept the ship intact.”

“Or any of its passengers alive,” Fotios added.

Damon and Gyro shared a look.

“I think the kyrios of the Raging Heaven would oppose anyone on this earth, given an excuse to do so,” Gyro eventually said.

“And we didn’t build this ship to chase pirates,” Damon added.

I blinked. Fotios tilted his head.

The message that the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had sent to the Scarlet City specified that a passenger transport with precious cargo on board had been waylaid at one of the micro islands located between the Scarlet City and the shores of Olympia. It had implored - in the same way that a lion implored a lamb - our Uncle as well as Yianni Scala to aid the Half-Step City in its efforts to salvage the ship’s contents before they were lost forever. What else could that have meant besides pirates and precious exports?

The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

“Damon,” I said in a low voice.

“Yes, brother?”

“When you said ravenous creatures, you were disparaging sea reavers. Right?” The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn smiled faintly. “You meant pirates, right?”

In the shadowed distance, a woman’s agonized shriek erupted from the waves.

1.60 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Pull!”

“The oars in-to your guts un-til the tides are gray,” Gyro sang, volume and spirit filling the gaps a poor singing voice left.

“Pull!” we bellowed, bracing our feet on the benches in front of us and heaving on our oars with all our might.

“The stars, down from the sky, until the night is day!”

“Pull!” The Eos sailed across the waves as fast as an eagle flew. The product of four brothers’ labor joined conviction seemed to nearly outpace the breeze, though the winds never fell out of her sails.

“The sword, out from the sheath, I feel the fight it comes!” Gyro sang and worked his oar at once and in rhythm, neglecting neither in the process. He had mastered the hunting bird’s breath long before I had achieved proficiency - there wasn’t a single heavy breath to mark his exertion. As he braced and leaned back to pull, and then hunched forward again, the only signs of his effort were the sweat on his brow and the bulging veins in his neck.

“Pull!” I roared, determined to match him till the end. To my right, on the bench adjacent, Fotios laughed wildly.

“The sun that’s reaching out, from under Tyrant’s thumb!”

“Pull,” Damon demanded, at the forwardmost bench beside Gyro’s, and we all fought the Ionian to obey.

Some of us more successfully than others. I gnashed my teeth, watching the wood-carved lady of the Eos drift sideways against the horizon as our ship’s pace was unbalanced once again.

Damon had distributed us evenly across the benches. There were two rows of four on the deck, one for every oar, and the two eldest of the young pillars had taken the left and right benches up front for themselves. Behind Damon was the slave whose chains he’d broken, while Gyro’s slave sat behind him. Though Fotios and I had protested it vehemently, we sat the third row benches behind our older brothers’ slaves and watched their backs while they worked. Thon and Dymas, the slaves my twin and I had taken on at Damon’s suggestion, sat the rear benches behind us.

And as I watched our ship drift once more towards mine and Damon‘s side on the left, I began lamenting my choice.

“Pull!” I snarled, twisting as I pulled my oar to look back at Thon. My blood roared in my ears, such that I didn’t register Gyro’s next line at all.

“Pull! Damn you to the pits beneath the earth, like you mean it!” I shouted at the slave. Thon gasped raggedly, his ugly face contorting as he pulled back on his oar. Drenched in sweat and flushed from the tips of his ears to the divots of his collarbone, he looked for all the world like the hardest working man on the ship. And yet, with every cut of the oars, our course drifted further left.

I inhaled sharply, gathering up every scrap of pain and exertion that the hunting bird’s breath had dispersed throughout the channels of my body. My pneuma rose.

“I said -”

“Pull!”

“- yourself together, brother!” Fotios hollered, meeting the furious glare I turned upon him with wild cheer. The wings of our influence beat challengingly, true wind kicked up by formless pneuma buffeting us both and blowing back the damp curls of our hair. “You have no one to blame but yourself if he falters!”

“L-lord Ae-” my worthless slave tried to speak up, gasping the words, and I saw our side of the ship lose further ground as he diverted his efforts from the oar.

“I’ll-”

“Pull!”

“- your tongue out of your mouth! Be silent!” I beat the wings of my influence once. Thon’s teeth snapped together and he hissed through them, throwing his body back into the next pull.

“This is my fault, then!?” I demanded, rounding back on my twin. “I’m to blame because the ugly wretch couldn’t -”

“Pull!”

“- a thought from his empty head, let alone an oar! That’s my burden!?”

Fotios rolled his eyes at me, his good cheer not faltering. I knew, in the way that only siblings that had shared a womb could know one another, that he was taking nearly as much joy from my anger as he was from this excursion itself. I tried to hold onto that knowledge. I tried to brace myself behind it like a shield, to resist my rising ire. I failed miserably.

“Choosing him is your burden,” my twin threw back. “Leaving him to suffer is your fault, asking him to -”

“Pull!”

“- a cultivator’s share without the breath to fill his lungs - that’s your blame to take!”

“Pull!”

Fotios took one hand off his oar and pointed it at me in condemnation. I stomped the bench in front of me in frustration when Dymas, the slave he’d chosen for himself, held sharply and put twice the strength into his next pull, compensating for my twin.

“Idiot brother,” Fotios condemned me, “you’re the only one whose slave is still in chains!”

“Pull!” the Young Aristocrat demanded. Seven cultivators of virtue and one bonded slave pulled their oars against the waves.

“What’s stopping you, Stavros?” Gyro called back across the deck, abandoning his next verse. “You liked him well enough to pick. Why not set him free?”

Damon had broken the shackles that bound his slave to the Rosy Dawn Cult before the Eos was even built. I knew it, because he hadn’t left the sun-bleached sands of the docks even once during the ship’s construction. He’d worked without sleep, without sustenance, from the moment the figurehead’s first grasping hand was carved and until the ship’s last rope was tied.

Gyro had reached out and taken his slave’s wrists in hand as soon as the Eos breached the waves, breaking the gaunt man’s bonds without a second’s hesitation. As if he had made the decision long before today, just like Damon. As if he had only been waiting for the proper time.

Seeing that, and seeing the haste with which our older brothers set the rowing pace, Fotios had followed suit while we all settled into our rhythm - reaching back without looking and tearing Dymas’ shackles off his wrists with a sharp jerk. It broke the slave’s skin, coating his hands and half of his oar in blood, but he didn’t utter a word of complaint. His eyes were clear and bright, his spine straighter with every pull. My twin’s slave worked his oar with mangled hands like he was rowing straight to heaven.

There had been a moment, then, a hesitant beat in the motion of the oar behind me. It was no longer Kronia and the slave I’d chosen had enough sense not to voice his expectation in that moment. But it had been there, and it had been loud. Thon had asked me without words to break his chains as well.

And I had ignored him.

Why not set him free? I felt my expression twist. I put everything I had into the next turning of the oars, but Fotios simply matched me. As Damon and Gyro matched one another, and as their slaves matched each other in turn. The one and only dissonance in our efforts lay behind. In the ugly slave with the often broken nose, and the newly woken cultivator rowing on his right.

“Why should I!?” I shouted. Damn them all, and damn him twice. This was supposed to be an adventure worth remembering fondly. The young pillars of the Rosy Dawn, the young generation of the Aetos family, positioned ahead of everyone else in the Scarlet City during a time of crisis - poised to seize glory before even the indolent Burning Dusk could take it from us.

This was supposed to be fun.

“Why should you follow your wiser and better looking brother’s example?” Gyro responded, winking over his shoulder at me. “Was that the question?” Directly behind him, the slave he had freed had the audacity to chuckle. To laugh at me.

“No.” The wood in my hands groaned and flexed, each of my knuckles bleeding white. “Why should I turn aside my principles because Damon has a plan?” The wings of my influence beat, filling the Eos’ sail and spilling over its edges. “Why should I risk the virtue in my soul because Fotios didn’t bother to think before he followed your example!?”

“What do your principles have to do with this?” My twin asked incredulously.

Thoughtless twin. You should know.

I answered in the way only a Sophic cultivator could. With the full force of a truth that I had learned, a principle that I had refined - and I slammed it through their skulls with the blade of my own lived experience.

[Young Aetos, please - it’s enough.] My forehead rebounded off the chipped and weathered marble of the octagon, light exploding behind my eyes in place of pain. The senior cultivator eyed me scornfully as I forced myself back up. Around us, his fellow mystikos of the Burning Dusk heckled and laughed while the children of the dawn averted their eyes in shame.

[Young Aetos, please - there’s nothing you have to prove to them.] The people of the Scarlet City cheered wildly as my opponent wrenched my left arm from its socket. The sand of the pit was hot enough to burn as he rolled me and pressed my face down into it, the falling sun burning over the Scarlet Stadium. I bucked wildly against him, even when the grinding of my dislocated shoulder overwhelmed the hunting bird’s breath and the pain filled every one of my senses. I tried to rise, rise like the dawn, but it was already so close to dusk. My opponent in the wrestling event pressed down on me with the full force of his foundational mystery and drove me into the sand.

[Young Aetos, please - an aristocrat has better things to do.] I slammed a clenched fist through the teeth of a burly mystiko of the Burning Dusk. He staggered back with both hands over his mouth, blood pouring out from the creases between his fingers. His fellow initiates cursed and converged on me all at once, beating me in a back alley of the Scarlet City that the Burning Dusk Cult had claimed as its own.

[Young Aetos, please - it’s too much!] I waded through rivers of blood-orange flame, inhaled the disturbing odor of my own burning flesh, and reached up. Up, through the difference in our standing. Up, through the vast and endless boundary that separated the eighth rank of the Sophic Realm from the ninth. Up, through the flames of a cultivator’s virtue, to seize a fellow Young Aristocrat by the throat. I pulled a son of Yianni Scalla out from his flames and slammed my forehead against his. Light flashed behind my eyes in place of pain. He went limp.

I took one of the young pillars of the Burning Dusk Cult in hand, one of the favored souls that ruled in this city of bisected wonder, and I threw him off the side of his own mountain range. I basked in my advancement as my pneuma doubled and redoubled. I basked in the rush of winning a trial by hunger. I basked in the real and tangible strength I took from him in that moment, a portion of his vital essence filling the channels of my body as I inhaled, a piece of Anakle Scalla’s soul breaking away in my teeth and settling in my stomach.

More than any of that, though, I basked in the incorporeal things I had taken from him. The respect of those he called his friends and considered his peers. The confidence he inspired in those of his cult, the proxy superiority he allowed them all to claim - as if they were all of them better than the best of us. I spread my arms and the wings of my influence wide and cast my shadow upon those that had gathered to watch a young upstart from the Rosy Dawn challenge a young pillar of the Burning Dusk in the middle of his own cult.

Young men and women, boys and girls and elders covering up their age with the cosmetics of cultivation, converged on me from all sides in howling rage. They hurled their own hungering challenges at me. For those without the fortitude to go that far, challenges to the trial by reason or the trial by spirit came instead. The true cowards among them didn’t even venture that much. Instead they challenged my right to be on their mountain, challenged the validity of my victory, challenged my manhood and my virtue and anything else they could think to say while safely backed by the rest of the crowd.

[Young Aetos, please-!] they reached for me, and in those reaching hands I saw the servants of my cult. I saw the elders, the grovelors and bootlickers, the suitors and their scheming fathers. Reaching out, offering me a hand from the very beginning and through every hardship that followed. Offering me an escape from the disparity in my city, assuring me that they’d pull me up to the lowly peak of the Rosy Dawn if I would only let them.

I spat on that outreached hand -

-and Gyro watched my spittle hit the deck between us.

“A man pays his own way,” I said, and the strength of one of my principles filled my limbs. I exhaled sharply and pulled.

Fotios hissed a curse beside me, his pneuma rising and the wings of his influence beating as he quickly tried to match me. It wasn’t nearly enough. The Eos’ course jerked right, correcting itself as I overwhelmed the efforts of my twin brother and his newly freed slave with the truth of my conviction.

“You shouldn’t need me to tell you what you already know!” I continued, pulling again with all that I had, reinforcing my oar with myriad truths so it wouldn’t snap apart in my hands. “The four of us know the worth of what we are because we earned it ourselves! Why should I turn away from that now when you’re the ones that set the pace? How can I deprive a man of the promise I saw in his soul by paying his freedom’s price for him?”

I heard Thon’s ragged breath hitch behind me, saw his oar freeze mid motion. And then all the world heard him shout, heard him holler breathlessly up at heaven as he reached within himself and found strength where there had been none before. It wasn’t a cultivator’s breakthrough, and no outpouring of pneuma followed.

It was more mundane than that. It was far more profound.

Thon threw his entire body and all that he was into rowing. It still wasn’t enough to match the freedmen beside him, but it was enough for me to bridge the gap with the strength of my principle.

“We’re all tenth rank,” Fotios panted, thrown off the rhythm of his own breathing by the memory I’d assaulted him with as well as his swift effort to meet my pace. He didn’t seem too upset about it, though. “What are you going to do if I pull out all my principles and truths to match you, huh? Catch a muse’s eye and ascend just to spite me?”

“I’d move heaven and earth to spite you, brother,” I promised him, and Gyro laughed from his place at the front.

“If that’s how it is, then fair enough! But don’t expect any mercy from me!”

Thon roared, spittle hitting the back of my neck as he threw even a slave’s courtesy to the wind in favor of force. Heedless to everything but his oar. Finally.

I scoffed at my second eldest brother. “As if we’d need it.”

“Pull,” Damon demanded, with a smile on his face.

1.59 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“What does this have to do with sailing?” Gyro asked curiously, having arrived late to the entire tangent.

Sitting as they were, side by side and cheek to cheek, even a close acquaintance could have mistaken them for twins like Fotios and me. Clear blue eyes swept over Damon’s designs, deep brown curls that he always wore longer than the elders preferred spilling past his shoulders. They had the same nose, the same strong jaw and the same ears that sloped up into a slight point.

“We’re decorating the ship,” Damon said, and Gyro nodded as if that explained everything.

“Asking nicely, looks like.”

“This is why people don’t talk to the two of you,” I said. Gyro laughed and Damon hid a smirk behind his fist.

“I’ll be clear, then, for the boys that chose the champion’s path over the scholar. As captains of the Sophic Realm, I understand that your skulls are already filled to bursting with the ten meaningful thoughts you were forced to think.” Gyro’s boisterous laugh turned to an ugly chortle while Fotios and I offered him a sacred Aetos gesture - the bird.

“As philosophers, we invoke myriad truths in order to Amplify ourselves in the world around us,” he explained, wrestling down his mouth. “We live by certain principles, and we impose our own lived experiences onto others. Each of these things is a crucial element of a thinking man -”

“Those aren’t elements,” the old man interjected.

“Pardon, Aristotle. It was just a figure of speech.”

“It was flowery rhetoric.”

“Gods forbid and we say a thing because it sounds good,” Gyro said, rolling his eyes. Aristotle snorted and laid the back of his hand across the second eldest Aetos’ temple, knocking his head into Damon’s. “Point being, there are three aspects that make up a philosopher’s cultivation, just as there are three aspects of the soul. Is that much fair to say, honored elder?”

“The tripartite soul,” Aristotle said distastefully. “Shall we give them a lecture on the forms while we’re at it?” The father of rhetoric sneered and turned his head to spit over the side of the ship.

“Master,” Daemon said, his eyes distant as he considered his lines, “you’re being obnoxious.”

Aristotle sighed and waved a hand. “Fine, fair enough. Take the broad and his rule of threes.”

“I thank the master,” Gyro said, smirking. To us, he continued, “though some clearly have concerns with his model, we look to the broad and his theory of the tripartite soul as cultivators of virtue. We strive to refine our reason, our spirit, and our hunger, while we cut a path up to heaven.

“And as we do this, we look for that tripartite reflection in other things. We ascribe reason to the Philosopher, because the Scholar was the most rational of us all -” To this point, even Aristotle had no objection. “We ascribe spirit to the Hero, because the Champion’s heart flame burns eternal in the Olympic torch. And we ascribe hunger to the Tyrant, because the Conqueror devoured everything east of the free Mediterranean. We associate these concepts with physical organs, brain, heart, and gut.”

“It’s human nature to seek patterns in all things.” Damon leaned back from his work, Gyro’s back bumping against a vertically mounted beam that would serve as the ship’s mast while our elder brother used him as a cushion. “It’s how we’ve advanced to this point as human beings, it’s how our culture has advanced further than that to become civilized, and it’s how the four of us will advance further than any others.”

“To the peak,” Fotios and I murmured, like a prayer.

“To the peak,” Gyro affirmed, gazing up at the cosmic glory. He continued, “that pattern of three exists within each of the greater realms. We attach reason to the Philosopher, just as we imagine him walking the Scholar’s path, but it isn’t always so simple. A philosopher is still a man, and a man can walk any path he chooses to.”

Gyro raised three fingers, one after the other. “The philosopher can reason, the philosopher can have passion, and the philosopher can hunger. He must do all of these things if he is ever to advance past frail mortality.”

“We have three core abilities that we’ve nurtured and refined since ascending to the Sophic Realm,” Damon explained, raising his own three fingers as he did. “As mentioned before. Invoking the rules of nature, living by principle, and imposing our lived truths onto others.”

Reason. Spirit. Hunger.

Fotios and I took that in, let it simmer in our minds. Things always seemed to make more sense when it was Damon or Gyro saying them - when they cared enough to draw back the curtains on their infuriating rhetoric and let the simple minds see their point. Obnoxious bastards.

“Then this decoration is a philosopher’s reason,” I ventured.

“And what led you to that conclusion?” Aristotle pressed me. I grimaced.

“Invoking the rules of nature,” Fotios jumped in, thankfully. “Invoking. Appealing to a higher authority. The unmoved mover that you mentioned before. That’s what we’re doing when we call upon truth as a source of strength.”

“Good,” Aristotle said, satisfied. “How would you appeal to a superior in your cult, or a man with greater cultivation? How many ways can a man appeal to a higher power?”

“As many as there are stars in heaven,” Gyro answered. “Whether it’s a fine sculpture or a persuasive argument, strength or guile or beauty. What matters is that it’s pleasing.”

Damon waved a hand at the section of the boat that he scarred with flame. “All that matters is the aesthetic.”

Made up of dozens upon dozens of winding lines and finger carved pharaohs, an eagle’s head had been burned into the uppermost bones of the ship. Closest to the figurehead, the wooden maiden reaching both hands wantonly for the sea.

“Divinity exists apart from us,” Damon said quietly. “We appeal to them the only way we can. By creating beauty worth regarding. By living lives worth speaking of. Gyro misled you - this design is a philosopher’s reason, yes, but it is also passion and hunger. Each one of these lines was drawn with a rule of nature in mind, by a man living in accordance to his principles, and imbued with the light of his lived experiences.”

“But why do we have to add our marks to it as well?”

He smiled faintly. “Because this is more than just my ship. It’s ours”

“Leave your mark however you see fit,” Gyro advised us. “Your own truth, your own principles, your own lived experiences. So long as it fits.

“So long as it’s aesthetic.”

Fotios and I exchanged a look. Already, we each knew what we’d be contributing to the house. The Young Aristocrat, head of the young generation, had left his mark with an eagle crown. Gyro, the predator with his talon blade, would doubtlessly leave his mark in a similar form. Leaving Fotios and I between them.

What else could we be, if not the wings?

“It’s going to be a long night,” I said warily. Though I couldn’t deny a bit of excitement. Our ship. Yes, it was, wasn’t it?

“We’ll sleep when we’re at sea,” Fotios said, grinning and heaving himself over to the other side of the ship to stake his claim on a quadrant of unburnt timber.

“Won’t be long,” at this pace, Gyro mused. He glanced down at Damon. “You’re not wasting any time.”

“The sooner it’s ready, the better.”

Gyro chuckled. “You keep saying that, but you’ve yet to tell us why. Where’s the fire?”

The bright concentric rings whirling in the Young Aristocrat’s eyes froze for a moment. I blinked, and they resumed.

“I don’t know,” he admitted

“Then why are we rushing at all?” I asked, irritated.

“Respectfully,” Fotios added, as disrespectfully as he could.

Damon shrugged. “I have a feeling.”

In the end, I supposed that was all we’d ever needed to hear.

§

“Lord Aetos! Lord Aetos!”

“Hngh!?” I jerked upright, leftover cloth that hadn’t made it onto the mast falling away from me. Fotios thrashed awake on the adjacent rowing bench, cursing like he was a sailor already as he reached into his tunic and pulled a trident out of a fold in the cloth.

I followed his example, reaching into a fold in my own scarlet cult attire, a fold in logic -

The next sentence is true. The previous statement is false.

-and pulled from it my spear.

I was halfway through a javelin-style toss over the side of the Eos when I recognized who it was shouting up at us from the beach. I squinted blearily down at an ugly slave with a broken nose, his features partially blocked by the arms he was holding protectively over his face.

“Wait!” he shouted, panicked. “It’s me! Don’t-!”

“Thon?” I demanded. “What are you doing here?”

“The kyrios received word from Olympia this morning!” Another slave whose name I didn’t know tossed a roll of papyrus up to us.

Fotios groaned, catching it. “Gods damn you, Dymas. Was it really so important that you had to wake us at this unholy hour?” The slave, Dymas apparently, glanced up at the cheery skies above. The sun was just passing its zenith.

“Apologies, Lord Aetos,” he chose to say. Wise slave. “See for yourself.”

My twin grumbled and unfurled the missive, the seal having already been broken. I leaned over from my own rowing bench and read it over his shoulder.

Oh.

“Damon!” Fotios called, wide-eyed. “There’s trouble in the Ionian!”

“The kyrios is in talks with Yianni Scalla,” another slave I had never seen before hurriedly explained, already climbing up onto the deck. He rushed to Gyro, who was stretching himself awake at the aft of the ship. “He wants to see you all as soon as he’s back at the main estate. Quickly, Lord Aetos! We have to move!”

“No need,” Damon said, already up and with a line of rigging in hand, and with a vast rushing sound of falling cloth the Eos let fly her sails for the first time. The wind filled them at once, the ship straining as the eagle we’d burnt into her bones struggled to take flight.

Then the ship jerked beneath our feet, nearly throwing Fotios and I over the side, and we looked over to see the fourth slave of Damon’s choosing silently heaving the ship towards the cresting waves. For a slave to have such strength was -

Wait. “Where are your chains?” I asked the slave. He didn’t bother looking up from his work, even as Thon and Dymas rushed to add their own shackled strength to his efforts in launching the ship out.

But he smiled with grit teeth, and answered.

“Lord Damon set me free.”

We looked to the Young Aristocrat, each of us young pillars of the Rosy Dawn Cult. Our eldest brother favored us with a rare grin.

“There’s trouble on the Ionian,” he said with fierce conviction. “Olympia has called for our aid. Who are we to ignore her?”

We’ll need eight, he’d said, to each of us so long ago. Eight oars sat ready and waiting on the Eos’ deck, eight empty benches waiting to be seated.

“Just a feeling,” I muttered incredulously. Fotios laughed and leapt to his oar as we plunged into the Ionian. I reached over the side and helped Thon and Dymas up while Damon’s freedman inhaled sharply and leapt straight up onto the deck.

Well, whatever it was, some things never changed.

Life was always more exciting with my brothers.

1.58 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“You did well, both of you.” Gyro paced a winding line through the sand, rhythmically easing his blade out of its sheath a sliver before dropping it back into place. “I couldn’t have found better materials if I tried.”

“Joy,” Fotios muttered beside me, holding scarlet cloth in front of him like a shield. “Joy and rapture.” His eyes were clenched shut in expectation of pain.

Not that I was very much different. I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, hiding behind the ash tree as much as I was holding it upright. The rhythmic click, click of our older brother’s sword falling back into a sheath paused. In an instant, Gyro’s pneuma rose and the trace of a blade cutting through air tickled my left ear.

“Fuck!” I snarled. A section of the ash tree cut so cleanly that I had only felt it’s sudden absence in the shifting of weight hit the sand and toppled. Another hiss and a brush of phantom sensation by my left knee. “Gyro!”

“Yes brother?” he asked pleasantly, circling around with a critical eye.

“Watch where you’re cutting,” I demanded, feeling sweat bead on my brow. “The Aetos line needs heirs.”

“Not that that has anything to do with you,” Fotios remarked. A moment later he yelped and flinched back, a section of scarlet cloth falling away without any frayed or jagged edges to mark its separation.

“All these years of practice and my brothers still doubt me with a blade,” Gyro despaired, lashing out half a dozen times as he did. Sections of cloth and hardwood fell away with every lash, and soon enough the tree had been trimmed down to a single heavy beam and planks of varying length and thickness. The scarlet cloth was added to a pile of other myriad silks, blood oranges and vibrant yellows.

“The only thing I doubt is your intent,” Fotios said petulantly, smacking sand out of the rugged cult attire that every initiate wore for Kronia. Gathering up the sail clothes, he wasted no time sprinting to the other side of the beach. Idley, as he passed, Gyro flicked his blade and cut a few curls hanging by the nape of his neck. I watched my twin curse and stumble into the shallow waves with mixed feelings.

“Please don’t touch my hair,” I said when Gyro looked back at me. “It’s just how I like it.” He smiled and dipped his head towards the cypress tree, still in need of carving.

Midday gave way to dusk, each of the shades represented in the pile of silks we’d stolen for our ship reaching out tirelessly across the heavens. Lunch came and went along with dinner, an unforgivable shame that we had not been present to entertain our slaves on this day of festivities. Alas. Our brother had decided that a ship had to be built. And as with most things, when Damon decided a thing needed to be done, all else fell away.

“Boys,” the man in question called as the moon fell up into the sky and the rosy light of our cult’s greater mystery bloomed in his palms. “Come make yourselves useful.”

Boys, he called us, as if we were separated by more than a few years. I hopped up onto the skeletal frame of the ship, still just the suggestion of a whole. It was going to be another long night.

An even longer night, I realized, when I landed precariously on one of the naked beams and saw what my eldest brother had been doing with his time.

“What is that?” Fotios asked incredulously, landing adroitly beside me.

Surrounding Damon, spanning out from the central point where he sat, the beams and planks that I had so painstakingly gathered that morning were covered in burning formations. As we watched, he dragged the tip of one finger across an ash beam and a line of smoldering lights followed. The word didn’t burn, not fully, the way a mundane flame would. It blackened beneath the lines of light, but it never once spread.

“Decoration,” Damon answered, pulling back and flicking the rosy light from his finger. It landed in the sands beside the ship and bloomed, slowly like a flower, until it was the size of a bonfire. A suitable source of lighting that impossibly gave off no heat. Damon had always been the one with the finest control of the four of us.

“Naturally,” I said, as if that made perfect sense. “What do you need from us?”

He propped his cheek up on a clenched fist, cross legged in the sullen lights of his designs. In the light of our foundational mystery, the concentric circles ringing his pupils seemed to burn malevolently as they sun.

“Add to it,” he bade us.

“Absolutely not,” I said immediately.

Fotios didn’t even bother with a verbal response, stepping backwards off the skeleton of the ship and falling into the pile of sailing cloth.

“I sacrificed an entire day for this, and that’s fine,” I told him, “but I’ll swim laps in the styx before I sit down and finger-paint a ship when I could be in the gymnasium.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Decoration is going to make the ship float, is that it?”

“It might.”

I blinked and turned to regard an old man in rags of scarlet and gray sitting beside my brother.

“Elder.” I bowed my head, confused but not bereft of my senses. “I didn’t notice you there.”

“I know you didn’t,” Damon‘s mentor said, sitting with one leg tucked up underneath him and the other dangling as he balanced on the figurehead of the Eos - for some reason, the very first portion of the ship that Damon had completed. “But I was here, even so.”

“Elder?” My twin’s face appeared at the edge of the ship, Fotios pulling himself up just enough to see the unkempt philosopher. “When did you get here?”

“Yesterday. Your brother has been busy.”

“He always was.” I frowned and brushed my thumb across one of the lines he’d burnt into the ship. A shock of something, some whispered sensation, leapt from the design to my hand. It raced through the channels I had worn through my body with the hunting bird’s breath, settling at the base of my skull as an echo of a truth.

If God wills it, you can sail even on a mat.

“Decoration,” I repeated, while Fotios followed my example and stiffened up at the feedback he received.

“Decoration,” the old philosopher agreed.

“I’ll admit that I spend more time in the octagon than I do with my tutors,” I said. “But this feels more significant than that.”

“How so?” Damon’s mentor asked.

“Brother,” I entreated him. I had learned my lesson long ago that the only man with the patience for Damon‘s mentor was Damon himself. These days, I didn’t even bother engaging him if I could avoid it. My ego could only suffer so much abuse before it shattered

“It is a decoration,” Damon said, taking pity on us. He brushed wild dark hair out of his eyes and leaned down. The rosy light grew brighter in response to his proximity. “It’s also an appeal to higher power.”

Fotios raised an eyebrow and held out his own empty palm, coaxing light to it. He nodded down at his hand, at the application of a question inspired by the mystery of the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god.

“That sort of higher power?” I asked.

“The world does not revolve around your lonely burning god,” the old philosopher in rags of anonymity said with polite disdain. “There are as many natural mechanisms as there are stars in heaven, as many gods as there are no constants in this life.”

“If not a god, then what?” I cracked my neck, the eerie weight of that burning truth I’d overheard in the flame still noticeable at the point where my skull met my spine.

“No, it is a god,” the old man said. “Just not your corpse god. An originator. In building this ship, We take a substance changeable and perishable and shape it to our needs. In beautifying it, we appeal to the unmoved mover, immutable among heaven and earth, in the hopes that our ship might become something closer to the divine - changeable, yet eternal.”

“You don’t believe us,” Damon said without any particular heat. If anything, he was amused. “Allow me to make up for fourteen years of poor instruction, then - our wise elders taught you the principal theories of natural philosophy. They did that much, at least.”

“As best they could, yes.” An elder in the cult was due a certain level of respect, but an elder in cultivation was due even more. It was difficult to take our boyhood mentors seriously these days, regardless of my disinterest in their teachings.

After all, how could a captain of the Sophic Realm show academic deference to a bunch of old men that had yet to breach the ninth rank?

“Then you understand what it is we do when we invoke the rules of nature,” Damon continued, licking his thumb and dragging it back down one of the burning lines in the ship. A sharp hiss and rising steam followed. When the steam cleared, A furrowed scorch remained.

I flexed the fingers of my hands, all ten of them, and then curling each digit I recalled a principle that I had internalized during my time as a Philosopher. One for every rank. ten lessons learned, ten rules of nature I had made my own. Every one of them carved into my soul.

“It’s a Philosopher‘s nature to question greater authorities,” I said, reciting an old line our father had told us when we were boys.

“It’s a Hero’s nature to defy greater imposition,” Fotios picked up where I left off.

“And it’s a Tyrant’s nature to impose,” Gyro said, appearing silently behind Damon and leaning over his shoulder, one arm hooked around his torso with a hand loosely splayed over his brother’s chest. “The greater question is, what is a god’s nature?”

It was the final question our father would always ask us, and I've never been able to give him an answer that satisfied him. Neither had Fotios, or even Gyro. Damon had never bothered to try.

Until now, apparently.

“A god’s nature,” mused the young aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn, “is to live apart. Untouched and unspoken of.”

“An island in the sun,” the old philosopher concluded.

1.57 [Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

Dawn break my oath and cast me down, say all who walk in chains;

If turning wheels are what’s to come, I’d rather die in vain!

Lord take this son into your hand, I’ll stare until I’m blind;

Who needs their eyes to guide them home - on freedom’s wings we’ll fly.

I hummed an easy tune as I went about my work, the rosy light of a new day touching upon the furthest reaches of Alikos and her valence territories. The weather was pleasant - this early in the day, it was still cool enough to wear cult attire without cursing the kyrios that designed it. There was a breeze carried over the Ionian that soothed the sweat on a toiling man’s brow and reminded him that clear waves were waiting for him once his work was done.

Normally, I would still be fast asleep at this early hour. Today was an exceptional day, however. It was Kronia, the day that slaves rested and their masters labored in their place. Even a young pillar of the Rosy Dawn was no exception to tradition, and so here I was. Toiling away at first light so that others might rest.

“Honored Aetos, please - we don’t need that much timber!”

Admittedly, I may have gone beyond the duties strictly required. But what was a cultivator to do if not his best?

“I told you to call me Stavros for today,” I chided the flustered slave while I wrestled an ash tree out of the earth.

His name was Thon and he was usually stationed in the gymnasium, which meant I ran into him more than the average slave in the Rosy Dawn. He had something of an obsession with boxing, always observing initiates out of the corner of his eyes while about his work. And if his squashed and crooked nose was any indication, he did more than just observe the sport while in the company of his fellow bonded men.

It was common practice for the initiates of the cult to serve at least one slave their meals throughout the day. Generally, the Aetos family entertained the senior servants while the rest of the mystikos took their pick of those they were fondest of within the ranks. It was an interesting experience, if nothing else, and more than a few unlikely pairs would come together for today while all were equal beneath the sun.

This time last year, I had been in the courtyard with my brothers, tending to the filial pools while the oldest of our estate’s servants told us stories of our grandfather‘s generation and the feats its greatest cultivators had accomplished. The year before that I would have been in the gardens that my father’s mother had nurtured before any of the young pillars were born, carefully pulling weeds and tending to lilies, roses, and delicate chrysanthemums.

Kronia was a holiday that disdained all natural hierarchies. That was the ideal, at any rate. In reality, a lesser initiate would normally be here in my place, gathering timber for night fires and reconstruction. Even on a day like this, a young pillar of the Rosy Dawn had more suitable tasks he could be doing. That being said, here I was.

Today was exceptional in more ways than one.

The mighty ash tree groaned and gave way in a cacophony of splintering wood. I tore it from the earth, roots and all, and heaved it over my right shoulder, breathing a steady rhythm that broke up the strain and dispersed it through my body. The hunting bird’s breath was a meditative technique I’d resented my father for making me learn as a boy, but these days I was grateful for every breath it granted me.

I eyed the other upended tree that I’d dumped off to the side after finding this one - a soft cypress that could brush the roof of the gymnasium if I planted it inside. I carefully knelt, balancing the ash with one arm while I slid a hand under the balancing point of the cypress.

Thon crouched on the other side of the uprooted cypress and heaved on it with all his strength. I clicked my tongue but accepted the help for what it was, rolling the great tree into the crook of my arm and bouncing it up onto my empty shoulder.

“This is your day, Thon,” I told him. The man stumbled back, red-faced and panting. “The boys will have me over a barrel if you injure yourself trying to help with my share.”

“Yes, honored Aetos.” The slave’s broken nose wrinkled grotesquely with his grin. I barked a laugh.

“Ugly, arrogant slave.” I stood, carefully turning so neither of the trees on my shoulders struck the surrounding forestry. “Come. We’ll be late to lunch if we don’t hurry home, and then what will I do with all the lessons on courtesy your sister’s been giving me?”

Thon punched me in my unguarded side. It hurt him more than it hurt me, shackled as he was, but it was a good jab for a man without any pneuma. He’d been paying attention while at work in the gymnasium.

I considered the motley forests of the valley ahead, and the Scarlet City beyond. Thon cursed viciously beside me, shaking out his injured hand.

“Your sister hits harder than that,” I said absently, and chuckled at the answering kick to the back of my knee. “But the form wasn’t bad. You’ve been practicing.”

“I’m a humble slave,” Thon said through grit teeth, hobbling after me. He’d be walking that one off for the rest of the morning. “I would never try to take the sublime martial techniques of the Rosy Dawn for myself.”

“Naturally not,” I agreed, turning his way. Thon yelped and ducked as the ash tree balanced on my right shoulder nearly knocked him off his feet. “Ah, my mistake. This lowly sophist is inexperienced in the ways of working men.”

“That much is apparent.”

Thon was a sensible man, and good at what he did around the cult. On any other day he wouldn’t have dreamed of talking to an initiate of the Rosy Dawn in such a way, let alone to me. But Kronia brought the best out of us all. For today and today alone, I’d allow him the snark.

“You know, you’ve been improving in more than just the martial pursuits. I hear you’ve been making quite a bit of money playing that flute of yours for the women in the outer estates. Enough in the last two years to nearly afford your freedom's price.”

Thon raised an eyebrow. “The young aristocrat has been keeping track of me?”

“This young aristocrat has been keeping track of you. The young aristocrat has better things to do with his time.”

“Apologies,” he said at once, an ugly grimace marring his face. “I misspoke.”

It was odd, at times, seeing the truth of what a man could look like without the radiance of his vital essence to smooth his outer imperfections. Even the lowest citizen enjoyed the benefit of gradual refinement while their pneuma flowed freely and unfettered. To become a member of any greater mystery cult, even the low Rosy Dawn, an individual had to be truly gifted. That meant that nearly every man, woman, and child an initiate saw on a daily basis would be unnaturally pleasing to the eye. Each of them several steps closer to the divine standard than the average vagrant. Let alone a barbarian.

The slaves in our estates kept us grounded. Unable to cultivate virtue, their vital essence shackled by iron and chains, they kept us grounded in more ways than one. They were a living reminder of how far we had come, outside and in. A reminder of how far we had yet to go.

And they were a comfort to the juniors. Even the lowest initiate could take heart in the fact that they weren’t the ugliest on the mountain.

“I rescind my apology.”

I blinked. “For what purpose?”

“You were thinking something vile just now. It was written all over your face.”

“Fascinating. I’d try reading yours, but someone’s crumpled the papyrus.”

“No, please,” he said in a flat monotone, “not my ego.” I smirked and swung the trees around again, forcing him to drop.

We continued back towards the Scarlet City and the eastern mountain range beyond in that way, amiable conversation and the occasional jab to keep things interesting. It was a refreshing change of pace from his usual quiet acquiescence. The Thon that offered me towels and lathered my body in olive oil before a round in the octagon was a slave like any other, just barely notable for his inability to ignore a good boxing match. The Thon I had chosen to entertain for the Kronia was another man altogether.

Someone I wouldn’t mind exchanging discourse with more often. Haa. As always, my brother had been right. Damn.

“Honored Aetos,” Thon eventually said, after an extended lull in conversation. I didn’t respond, humming along to the same tune as before. He sighed. “Stavros.”

“Yes?”

We were nearly back now, the sun fast approaching its zenith. I could’ve made the trip in half the time, of course, if not a quarter. But I had asked Thon to show me where the good timber was, and it would’ve been rude to leave him behind afterwards. Especially today. I suppose it was fine. I hadn’t been given a particularly strict deadline for this task.

“Why have you been keeping track of me?” He finally asked, having finally mustered up the courage. It had taken him the entire agonizing trek through the city - which was hardly a friendly trip for a man hauling two trees over his shoulders - and half the way up the eastern mountain range, but he’d gotten there in the end.

“Because,” I answered, “a young pillar of the Rosy Dawn has the privilege of sponsoring anyone of their choosing when it comes time for the rites. So long as we see them through it to the end, and so long as we take responsibility for their performance in the cult from then on, we can choose anyone we want. Even a slave.”

Thon stumbled. I dipped my shoulder obligingly so he could catch himself on one of the uprooted ash’s swaying branches.

“You mean,” he stammered. “You- sponsoring me? For the Rosy

Dawn?”

“If you’re worthy of it,” I said, shrugging with some effort. The hunting bird’s breath dispersed the worst of the strain involved in carrying two trees like they were country yolks, but it had been a long trip. I was still only a Philosopher at the end of the day. “It is within my power to nominate a slave, but I’d rather not. Understand? If I were you, I would play that flute of yours extra sweet for the girls in the junior estates, and ascribe whatever meaning to the tune that would please them most. They’ll pay you more if you do.”

“So if I’m free next year -”

“If you’re worth something next year,” I cut him off. Horribly rude of me, and on Kronia of all days. Alas, I didn’t have nearly as much patience for mortals as my brothers did. “Pay your freedom's price as soon as you can and start cultivating virtue. Mimicking what you see a cultivator do in the gymnasium with shackles around your wrists is one thing. Executing a martial form as it was meant to be executed is something entirely different. Give yourself as much time as you possibly can to become a boxer as I am a boxer, and I'll see where you’re at when the trials come around again.”

“Stavros… This-” The slave with the ugly, beaten face swallowed heavily. “I am honored beyond all words-”

“I’d prefer it if you were honored beyond tears,” I said, nose scrunching in distaste. “If the rest of you is any indication, your crying face must be grotesque.”

A choked laugh. Thon dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, holding them there for a second and then scrubbing viciously. When he removed them his eyes were clear and bright.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly. I hummed dismissively. I hadn’t promised him anything yet - nothing that he wouldn’t have to take for himself. “But forgive me, and please don’t take this the wrong way - why?”

“Why?”

“Why me?” he amended. “As long as I’ve been here, the young pillars of the Rosy Dawn have never sponsored a single soul - freedman or not.”

We finally crested the outer peak of the eastern mountain range, stepping off the worn and scattered paths of the mountain and up onto the carved steps that lead to the Rosy Dawn Cult.

“Why?” It was a good question. There was a good answer for it as well, I was sure. I didn’t know what it was though. I just knew what I’d been told.

“We’ll need eight.”

“I wonder,” I said, and made my way to the central pavilion where the bulk of the night fires would be lit come dusk.

“What is - young Aetos, what is this? How many fires do you think we’re starting tonight? Where did you even find a cypress of this size!?”

Tragedy of tragedies, I’d brought too much after all.

“Excuse this lowly sophist, elder,” I said, bowing my head while the old philosopher grumbled and hacked away at the timber I’d brought along with a dozen lesser initiates. “I’m lacking in a servant’s wisdom. Allow me to make up for this lapse in judgment.”

A junior mystiko squawked in alarm as I shouldered him aside and dug my fingers into the soft bark of the cypress tree, dragging a long strip of bark cleanly off the trunk. The old philosopher, an elder by the name of Poecas that cultivated the virtue of boring me to tears in his lectures, sighed and combed agitated fingers through a thick gray beard.

“Do as you wish, young Aetos. We’re all slaves today-”

“Done,” I said, clapping my hands in satisfaction. The junior mystikos and the elder philosopher all stared down at the cypress and the ash, each stripped of their bark and branches by brisk swipes of my hands and a bit of pneuma.

“Young Aetos,” Poecas said slowly. “The trunks are still intact.”

“An eyesore to be sure,” I said, nodding firmly. “I’ll get them out of your sight, honored elder.”

“Wait-”

But it was too late. A young pillar’s jaunty stroll down the other side of the eastern mountain range was an old scholar’s full sprint, even with two freshly trimmed tree trunks hoisted over my shoulders to slow me down. Thon shouted something as I left them to their work, but he’d served his purpose for the day and he was far too slow to wait for. My deadline wasn’t strict, per se, but that didn’t mean I could take all day. If I did that, I’d be last.

And I refused to be last.

Out of the corner of my eye, as if by providence at that moment, I spotted a ruggedly handsome cultivator with a face identical to mine leaping out of a window to the kyrios’ main estate. He soared through the air, a massive bundle of scarlet cloth held tight in his arms and a wild grin on his handsome face. As he hurtled through the air and down the mountain, past me, my twin brother and I locked eyes.

Fotios Stavros whooped and gave me the finger.

We made it to the docks at exactly the same time.

“First!” Fotios shouted regardless, tossing his bundle of scarlet cloth up into the air in victory.

“The audacity,” I panted, furious and exhausted in equal measure. I shrugged the ash and the cypress off my shoulders, each kicking up scalding white sand as they hit the beach. “We got here at the same time!”

“How did the heel of my foot taste, Stav?”

I spat and tackled the handsome bastard into the sand.

“Neither of you were first,” came an amused voice, the quiet hiss of shifting sand and a looming shadow over our heads. The second oldest of the new generation smirked as he leaned down over us both, one hand on his hip and the other on the hilt of his belted sword. “I got here hours ago, and I was only second.”

“That doesn’t count,” Fotios said at once. “He never left last night.”

“And no one cares about you, Gyro,” I added. Our older brother scoffed and kicked sand into our faces.

“Come on, then,” Anargyros Aetos said, turning back to the mess of wooden construction on the far eastern side of the beach docks. “Damon’s only one man, and this ship won’t build itself.”

1.56

The Son of Rome

Griffon’s trio of Heroic cultivators stared at me without comprehension. The boys on either side of Lefteris leaned around their guardian to whisper to one another, confused. Anastasia, for her part, hummed and nodded once, as if I’d just confirmed a long held suspicion.

“Old ‘Zalus has been keeping quite a secret.”

“Fuck,” Elissa whispered.

“… fuck,” Kyno agreed.

“Fuck!” Lefteris slammed his hands to the table with force enough to crack it and make his boys flinch. Elissa smacked his shoulder so hard it nearly knocked him on his back, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. “Just what I needed! Just what we all needed!”

“I didn’t realize you felt that strongly about the Oracle,” I said, bemused. On his lounging couch at the far side of the room, Griffon watched Lefteris intently.

“I don’t,” Lefteris snapped. “I feel strongly about being passed a Tyrant’s secrets like a flask around a night fire. This isn’t bathhouse gossip, and ‘Zalus isn’t the kind of man to take an insult on the chin. Tyrants have burnt out entire family trees for less; don’t you understand?”

“Doubtful,” Jason said sarcastically. “How could Solus possibly understand the whims of Tyrants?” Scythas snorted.

I closed my eyes and prayed for patience.

“Whether or not Old Zalus takes offense to the airing of his dirty laundry has no bearing on us,” Griffon said, rising from his lounge. He ignored the myriad sounds of doubt and incredulity sent his way, approaching the table and taking a seat at its one remaining side. He reached for the map with a hand of flesh and blood, pressing a finger to our first destination.

“A Tyrant’s ire won’t deviate my cultivation or my digestion,” he said, smirking faintly at my sharp exhale. “Besides, once we’re finished with this, he’ll owe us all a greater debt than any insult could outweigh.”

“Oh my,” Anastasia whispered, eyes widening as she looked the map over again. Realization dawned in caustic green flame.

“The true Scarlet Oracle isn’t dead,” I explained to the rest of them. “She’s been asleep for sixteen years, suffering from an illness that no one could identify and none could hope to cure.”

“None could care to cure,” Griffon said with special emphasis.

“The kyrios.” Kyno put it together next.

“The kyrios,” I confirmed. “Socrates believes that nectar and ambrosia could cure whatever it is that ails the Oracle, but the kyrios refused to offer his personal stores and he wouldn’t allow anyone else the knowledge of how to synthesize it.”

“And he took it all with him when he challenged the fates,” Elissa said with mounting dread. I nodded.

“Even Socrates doesn’t know the exact recipe. But he knows the kyrios accumulated this knowledge as a hero, and he knows where the kyrios has been. Whatever the materials are, we’ll find them if we retrace those steps.”

“This is the kyrios’ epic,” Lefteris said with a dull sort of shock. Lean as he was, the lines of his jaw and cheeks had been prominent the moment I first saw him. The weeks since the funeral had only weathered him further - he looked nearly gaunt as he regarded the map now.

“We have to find whatever there is to be found at each of these locations,” I explained, keeping it short. Simple. They wouldn’t be able to process much more than that at the moment. “Which means securing passage through any cities we might encounter, charting courses and securing a ship for the locations that we can’t reach on foot. We’ll need provisions as well as a plan - several. Best if we split our efforts, focus part of our efforts on scouting the distant locations while the rest of us handle the nearby marks.

Kyno raised a hand, the other kneading at his forehead. “Slow down.”

“No, stop,” Elissa said, that fury rising in her voice. “And tell me that you don’t expect us to join you on this- this-”

“Thrilling adventure,” Griffon offered.

“Nonsense,” she spat. She slapped the map. “The full Mediterranean, from corner to corner! A journey across the civilized world while the Olympic Games are just four months away. Have you forgotten why we all came to Olympia in the first place, or-” and here the Sword Song glared at me and me alone. “Do you simply not care?”

“Where are the other competitors?”

Burning desert heat eyes swiveled and settled on the former Young Aristocrat.

“What?”

“Where are the other competitors?” he asked again, the scarlet gem of his necklace swaying as he leaned forward. “Hundreds of Heroes compete in the Olympic Games, is that not so? And yet, aside from the people in this room, I can count the number of other Heroic cultivators I’ve met in this city using only my hands.”

“How many?” I asked wryly, and he flicked the side of my head with fingers of violent intent.

“Well?” he pressed. “Where are they, Elissa?” She sneered at him. “Anastasia!”

“Yes, Griffon?” the caustic Heroine asked, amused.

“I am young and unrefined, brought up in a distant land with barbarians as my neighbors,” he said, glancing meaningfully my way. “Enlighten me - where are all the rest of the competitors?”

“Wherever it is that Heroes go, I imagine.”

“Ho? And why aren’t they here, preparing for the Games? They’re only four months away, after all.”

Anastasia considered Griffon, and then the fuming Heroine across the table. Her smile deepened. “Technically speaking, competitors aren’t required to be in the city of Olympia until a month before the Games. Most choose to spend their time abroad prior to that.”

“With their families and their cults?” Griffon asked. Anastasia laid a finger to her chin, making a show of thinking deeply. Slowly, Kyno began to inch himself closer to Elissa.

“Pursuing advancement, whatever that means for them. Every rank is an advantage over the competition, another door opened to them.”

“How so?”

“A Hero of the first rank can only compete in a single event, no matter how skilled they might be in others,” Anastasia explained earnestly, without any apparent satisfaction at Elissa’s rising pneuma. “A Hero of the second rank can compete in two, the third rank in three, and on it goes. Only a captain of the Heroic Realm can hope to win glory in every single event. Only a captain can hope to seize the Olympic flame.”

“So you’re saying glory goes to those with strength to seek it,” Griffon mused. Anastasia nodded, glancing slyly my way. Patience. Patience, until it’s done. “And rather than pursue her own strength to this end, rather than add to the epic inside her soul, the Sword Song would rather sit in this house and polish her blade for four months. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“No,” Anastasia said merrily. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Poisonous bitch,” Elissa snarled, and lunged across the table. The room exploded into motion, Kyno diving in between the two Heroic women while Lefteris threw his boys back against a cushioned lounge on the other side of the room. Scythas whistled sharply, gale winds rising around myself and him, while Jason palmed the daggers at his belt and rose.

Griffon raised an eyebrow at me from across the table.

Gravitas.

Half a dozen Heroic cultivators grunted and gasped as they were thrown back to the furthest edges of the room, each falling onto a cushioned lounge with varying degrees of composure.

Jason, off to my left, shot me a betrayed look while hanging over the headrest with his hair brushing the hearth’s coals. What did I do? he mouthed.

I rolled my shoulders, stifling a wince at the stabbing pain that followed. I was playing with fire here. More so than usual, given the company I kept.

“You were willing to stand with us against the Crows,” I said to Elissa. She stared mutinously back at me. “What’s changed since then?”

“We came together for our juniors that were suffering,” Kyno answered in her stead. “And we committed less then, compared to what you’re asking now.”

“Are you certain?” Griffon asked. He had anchored himself with all thirty of his pankration hands, resisted the captain’s virtue and remained at the table with me. “You allowed yourselves to be kidnapped from your rooms. You risked retribution from your elders, struck down the instruments of their influence with your own hands. You mean to tell me that defying eight took less from you than following the footsteps of one?”

“Not just any one,” Lefteris muttered.

“Granted. But think of what’s to be gained. Think of what we can see, what we could experience! Leave aside the question of nectar and ambrosia, resources that any cultivator would rip themselves apart to get a taste of. Think of what we could gain as men and women of principle, of passion, of purpose.

“And if you must be cynical, all of you that have come to the city of Olympia seeking the benefits that a champion’s glory can afford, imagine the gratitude of a Tyrant that’s just been given back his wife.”

“Why would you want to help him?” Elissa asked from her cushioned lounge, scarred legs tucked up underneath her.

“I just said-”

“No. Why would you want to help Old ‘Zalus? Either of you?” Desert heat swept over Griffon and I each in turn. “The last time we spoke of it, you said you had no allegiance to him or his faction here.”

“I don’t,” Griffon agreed.

“Then why?”

“I came to Olympia to see the Oracle.”

“You’ve seen them all!” she shouted. “All but one, and even then you saw her daughter! Was that not enough!?”

Griffon answered without hesitation.

“It wasn’t.”

“I told you already, Griffon,” Kyno said quietly, rising from the lounging couch he’d broken in half when he landed on it. “You’ll have to give us more than that if you want us to work with you. Now more than ever. Regardless of what you think of us, and regardless of your pride.”

“What are you here for, really?” Elissa pressed. “The Olympic Games, the company of the Oracles, the succession of the kyrios? Which is it?”

“All of those things, and more besides.”

“You’re both here on the Rosy Dawn‘s behalf,” Lefteris accused. “Don’t dress it up.” Griffon smiled and said nothing.

“At the bathhouse,” Kyno said, “you told us that Old Zalus doesn’t speak for the Scarlet City. What purpose could this quest possibly serve for Damon Aetos?”

I fully released my hold on the reins of the conversation, resigning myself to whatever absurdity Griffon had planned.

“What could the Tyrant of the Rosy Dawn possibly want with the recipe for nectar and ambrosia? The food and drink of divinity?” Griffon repeated for the benefit of all those in the room. “Is that what you’re asking me?”

There it was.

In the silence and dread that followed his words, Griffon pulled a scroll of rolled papyrus from the golden shawl wrapped around his waist. He laid it on the table beside the map, so that everyone could see the illustration on its worn outer surface. Four young men standing beneath a ring of dried blood - what had once been a scarlet sun, I realized.

“You want to know why Sol and I have accepted this quest? I’ve already told you. You want to know why we’re bringing you along with us? It’s just as simple - I believe there’s a thread that connects all of us here together,” he said, undoing the twine around the scroll. “Beyond our virtues, beyond our clashing temperaments, beyond our dreams and our tribulations - each of us has a Tyrant we’ve languished underneath for far too long. Each of us is looking for an escape from subjugation. Speak now or never again if I’m wrong.”

I opened my mouth.

“Be silent, worthless Roman.”

I snorted, but obliged him. No one else in the room tried to speak - not even the boys, interestingly enough. Though they may have just figured the question wasn’t for them.

“Right,” Griffon said sharply, casting aside the twine and sliding his thumb under the leading corner of the scroll. “I believe we can help one another, just as I believe there are still Heroes worth telling stories of buried somewhere in your souls. So, as a gesture of good will, allow me to be the first to share.”

He cracked the scroll open in one sharp motion, papyrus spilling off the table as it rolled across the room - all the way into the open hearth. The furthest edge of the old papyrus caught fire in an instant, and the light of the flames swiftly rushed up the rest of the scroll. Illuminating every word.

“Allow me to tell you a story about the man I’ve vowed to defy,” Griffon said, as the flames rose from the papyrus and pneuma spilled out of the scroll. He bared his teeth in a wicked grin as whispering rhetoric pressed against our senses and pulled us into the rosy glow.

“Listen closely. This is a story of Damon Aetos.”

1.55

The Son of Rome

We gathered in the home of the Sword Song, the first Heroine to respond to my unintended call on the night of the kyrios’ funeral.

She stood while the rest of us sat around a low table of carved mahogany. There were dining couches as well, enough scattered throughout the house for us all to sit if a few of us shared, but I hadn’t bothered dragging one over. The rest had followed my example and sat on the bare floor with varying degrees of propriety.

Elissa alone stood - silently glowering at the far wall. The first thing I’d noticed about her that first night had been the scars marring an otherwise flawless physique. The second thing had been the anger. Not at me for calling her out, though that had been present. Not at Griffon for slapping her in the face, though that had of course been there as well. Not even at the Tyrants and their games.

It was a deeper fury than that. Something I had no name for, but could pick out of a crowd of any size. It was a special sort of torment, the kind that made a man a horrible citizen and a valuable soldier. Gaius had trained me to notice broken souls. He’d trained me to sort those for whom war was the only salvation from those who would break beneath the weight of their sins.

You came here to seek your master, is that it? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that was your only intent? These people aren’t your soldiers. They don’t owe you their lives. Not yet.

That night, while the elders of the Raging Heaven beat their drums and the pyre smoke reached fruitlessly for the stars, I’d tasted salt and ash on the wind. I’d noticed the attention of a higher power whirling around Scythas, and I’d followed its path through the crowd with my burgeoning Sophic sense. That I’d found the rest of Griffon’s three was pure coincidence. That was all. None of what followed had been my intent at the time.

I looked around the table, at Heroic cultivators far stronger than myself. I looked at slumped shoulders and wary eyes - heart flames that flickered when they met my gaze.

Any man will go to war for you if given the proper cause, nephew. To fight is the legionnaire’s purpose. To find the legionnaire, to convince him of the necessity - that is ours.

I scowled and clenched my fist on the table. I hadn’t come to Olympia for that. Not here, not now. Nowhere and never again.

I’d seen the end of my path in meditation with Socrates. Burning the city of Carthage to ash and pouring salt into the last demon’s gaping chest. Alone. Living just long enough to swallow the final dog’s beating heart, and then returning to the Fifth where I belonged. Alone.

Griffon hadn’t been wrong. I wanted to know what was lurking behind each of these people. I wanted to know why they had chained themselves to the Raging Heaven despite once standing in defiance of tribulation lightning. I wanted to see it undone. But I had no illusions as to where that road led. Griffon had an ideal in his mind’s eye, a world that was poetry as much as it was reality, and he expected everyone else to fall in step with that vision.

Even if these fortuitous encounters yielded true companions, the union could only last so long. Every man stands alone against the heavens. They’d all stray eventually, lost again on their own paths.

And if they didn’t, I would. They were Greeks. No matter the route, no matter the tribulation, Olympus Mons was their final destination. It was inevitable that I’d leave them all behind. All of them. Even Griffon. For me, the end had been set in stone long ago. It didn’t matter which path I chose now.

All roads led to Rome.

Elissa’s pneuma flickered around her, tension coiling in the squaring of her shoulders as she laid a hand on her sword. Across the room, the only other cultivator that had not followed my example raised his head from the lounging couch where he’d been napping. Griffon blinked, smiling languidly.

“Just in time,” he said. A ferocious pounding on the door down the hall followed soon after.

“‘Left!” Elissa snapped, rushing down the hall. “If you break that door-!” The door slammed open.

“I’ll kill him!”

“Theri, You can’t!”

“He needs to teach us first!”

“Ho, so it’s fine after that?” Griffon asked, amused. Rolling onto his side, he propped his head up with one hand and raised the other in a greeting as Lefteris came storming into the room.

“You!” the bowman seethed. The two boys from before struggled futilely to hold him back, the smaller of them hanging off his neck while the larger of them attempted to yank him back by the waist. Elissa followed close behind, irritated but not quite willing to stop him. “Just who do you think you are!?”

“I’m glad you asked-”

“Don’t,” I said wearily. Griffon smirked.

“This isn’t funny! None of this is funny!” Lefteris raged, his pneuma rising precipitously.

“Easy.” Elissa gripped his shoulder. Where two Civic boys combined had failed to slow him down, that hand stopped him short. Lefteris heaved a helpless growl.

“You know this isn’t funny,” he said to her.

“It’s not,” Kyno rumbled. “But that’s how he is. We won’t get anywhere if we let him set the pace.”

“It’s the opposite,” Griffon corrected the hulking cultivator in the crocodile skin. Scarlet eyes glittered in the low light of the home’s hearth flame. “If you’d only follow my lead, you’d be at the end of the road before you knew it.”

“In pieces, maybe,” Scythas muttered, resting his chin in crossed arms on the table beside me.

“You had no right,” Lefteris accused the former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn. “No right to spirit them away after I told them to stay here!”

“I didn’t,” Griffon agreed.

“As if it wasn’t enough to take them out of the house, you took them out of the city entirely! Into the wilds!”

“It wasn’t like that, Theri,” the older of the two boys protested. The younger scowled and tightened his arms around the Hero’s neck, doing his level best to throttle him.

“We can take care of ourselves.”

“What would you have done if they came to harm?” Lefteris asked, shrugging off Elissa’s hand and advancing forward. Kyno rose from the table only for Griffon to wave him off. Jason leaned back on his elbows, crossed legs tucked under the table. Across from me, Anastasia watched with calm interest. “Would you have done anything? If a beast had taken them while you were looking the other way, swept up in whatever curiosity caught your eye - would you have noticed it at all?”

“Such suspicion,” Griffon replied without concern. “How cruel. Is that any way to treat a friend?” The Heroic bowman grit his teeth.

“We aren’t friends. We will never be friends.”

“I told you, boys,” Griffon said without breaking eye contact. The young redheads both perked up attentively. “Your guardian’s heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, the rest is often wrong.”

“Don’t talk to them,” Lefteris snapped. The flames behind his eyes flared. “Don’t even look at them!”

“Or what?”

“Enough.”

The attention of two boys and six Heroic cultivators fell heavily upon my shoulders. The captain’s virtue reached out through my voice and drew their eyes unfailingly to me. All of them except Griffon.

Gravitas is a Roman conceit, boy. You never bothered to consider the impact it could have on a Greek soul because it never mattered back then. But you’ve lost that luxury. If you want to accomplish anything at all before you return to the elements, you’ll have to find your place in this world once again. Whatever the rules were in the legions, whatever your limits were there, understand that they won’t necessarily be the same underneath a Greek sky.

Six Heroes were drawn in by the captain’s word, while a Philosopher of the second rank ignored it. I didn’t know why. I would have to find out.

For now, business.

“I apologize for Griffon,” I told the Gold-String Guardian, meeting his burning glare as forthrightly as I could. Finally, he exhaled and broke the captain’s gaze, looking away.

“He should apologize for himself.”

“It’s impossible for him,” I said. “His vital breath would flow backwards on the spot - he’d explode.”

Jason snorted a laugh, surprised more than anything. Scythas tucked his face further into his crossed arms to hide a sudden smirk while Anastasia’s lips curled. A sliver of tension eased out of the room, the Heroes letting down their hackles just a bit.

“My master is abusing me,” Griffon lamented. “And after everything I did to rescue him from that old man’s groping hands.”

“That was true, then?” Elissa asked, finally taking a seat at the table once she had forced Lefteris and his boys to sit first. “The message you sent with that eagle - the Gadfly really took you on as a student?”

“Student… isn’t quite the right word.” More accurately, the Gadfly had taken me on out of obligation, as a distant mentor to my own master. Even then, he’d taken me on the same way a man took on a feral dog. Keeping me away from polite company and vowing to beat the wolf out of me until I was civilized - whatever that meant to a Greek. “But yes, he’s offered me his wisdom for the moment.”

Lefteris and Kyno exchanged a look. Anastasia hummed, leaning across the table towards me.

“That’s quite an honor,” she said, significance in every intonation. “The Gadfly doesn’t offer his wisdom to just anyone these days.” She had foregone her cult attire since being stolen away by a pair of hungry ravens, and now black cloth spilled down slender marble arms as she leaned, emerald gems shimmering as they dangled from each of her ears. She’d tied her hair back into something more artful since the last time I had seen her, thickly interwoven braids the same color as her dress that spilled over one shoulder. Somehow, like this, she looked more menacing than she had with a bloody javelin in her hand.

“I’ll take what I’m given,” I said simply.

“Of course you will.”

A pankration hand slapped the table in between us, planting a worn papyrus map in the center. Anastasia leaned back while the rest of the Heroes and children around the table moved in around it.

“As much as I love to see your smiling faces gathered here together -” Griffon drawled from across the room.

“We’ve called you for a greater purpose today,” I finished, accepting the cue for what it was. Smoothing out the old map, I allowed each of them to drink it in. Jason and Scythas had already seen it back in the kyrios’ estate, but they pored over it again with full focus.

“We’re really doing this,” Jason murmured. Scythas nodded absently, eyes flickering across the various markers.

“Looks that way.”

“Doing what?” Lefteris demanded.

“What is this?” Kyno asked quietly.

“I’ve learned a few things since we last spoke,” I explained. “The nature of a wise man’s rhetoric, the greater scope of the late kyrios’ hunger, and more besides.”

The inexplicable influence of the shard from Babylon wavered on my tongue. That eerie stone tablet with every founding myth scrawled across its shifting surface - in every language of man - had left its mark on me, burrowed in through my eyes as I read it and settled along the surface of my tongue. Ready and willing to serve my needs. After I had gone back following that initial reading and finished the Theogeny as well as the Aeneid, my grasp of the myriad tongues of the Mediterranean had solidified in my mind.

It was a convenience that I could hardly believe any man would be afforded. But if my gut was right, this phenomenon explained Griffon’s eerie ability to translate his words to nearly a dozen different tongues while speaking only a single set of words. It also explained why none of the Heroic cultivators we’d encountered thus far had struggled to understand the Latin I spoke out of habit. Perfect translation. Effortless understanding, driven by an ancient relic.

At times, the Greek cities seemed as barbaric to me as the tent kingdoms and marsh empires of the western front. And then there were moments like that, when they so casually flourished ancient treasures that the Senate would wage war for. And I was reminded once again just how young my city was in the grand scheme of things.

How young it had been.

My fist clenched and unclenched on the table. Regardless. I wouldn’t mention that particular linguistic revelation just yet.  I had spoken to the Heroic cultivators in Latin up until now without issue, and I had no reason to change that. Let them think it was a deliberate choice on my part. The alternative would be a blow to an image I had no choice but to maintain.

“I also discovered something about the Oracle of the Scarlet City,” I said neutrally. Kyno and Elissa glanced warily at Griffon across the room. Too late for that now.

“We discovered that the girl who calls herself a seer is no seer at all,” Griffon said, his influence an odd thing as it clenched and unclenched around him. The mood he’d been in back in that courtyard was something I hadn’t seen from him in months. Agitated down to his bones.

“Not yet,” I said, and he scoffed.

Anastasia raised an eyebrow, something curious in her bearing. Off to the left, Elissa drummed her fingers on the polished wood of the table top.

“Everyone knows that,” the Sword Song said, unable to contain herself. “You’re telling me the great Solus and Griffon only just now figured it out?”

“Elissa,” Kyno warned her.

“What? They pulled us into all this, he went and roped the Oracle in under her father’s own nose, and now he tells us he had no idea what the girl really was?”

Damn it. I forced my teeth not to clench, my breath not to catch. Damn it. I should have known they’d know. I should have known-

“Just a moment,” Anastasia murmured. “Somehow, I get the feeling they’re not saying what you think they’re saying.”

Elissa frowned. “What do you mean?”

“It’s known that the previous Scarlet Oracle retired from her duties after giving birth, yes,” Anastasia said, glancing obliquely at the scarred Heroine, “though to say it’s common knowledge is rather disingenuous. Further, it’s known that the current Scarlet Oracle could not have possibly made the necessary journey to be crowned in her patron’s domain.”

“Because the Scarlet City is an island in the sun,” Griffon mused.

Because Damon Aetos was Damon Aetos.

“The last Oracle died in childbirth and the new one is unordained. What’s your point?” Lefteris asked. Caustic green eyes considered him, and then the children sitting on either side of him. The boys flushed at the Heroine’s smoldering attention.

“My point,” Anastasia decided, “is that they didn’t say she was an unordained seer. They said that she was no seer at all.”

“Meaning…” Elissa frowned, twisting a scar along her jaw. “Impossible.”

“Improbable,” Anastasia corrected her. The two Heroines stared hard at one another. Then, as one, they turned to me.

“What is it you’re trying to tell us, Solus?” Kyno asked me, the dull eyes of his crocodile cloak seeming to flicker and sharpen in the hearth’s low light. Well. I had little choice now.

“Selene lacks an oracle’s majesty,” I informed them. Then, as an afterthought, “And her mother is still alive.”

1.54

The Young Griffon

Emerging from the heart of the mountain was a slightly less pleasant experience than going in. My late uncle’s sword made for a poor walking stick, and using pankration hands to steady my body was a drain just severe enough to be noticeable. The Reign-Holder’s starlight marrow was doing its best, but Socrates had put some proper force behind his throw. For now I could only endure and do what I could with the knowledge Anastasia had given me, guiding my pneuma to the parts of my body where it was most needed - which, contrary to what one might expect, wasn’t always where the wounds were.

I raised a hand against the light as I stepped out. The mystikos standing guard at the entrance to the subterranean estate looked me over, visibly pausing at the ugly bruise on my chest where the old philosopher had thrown a rock at me and shattered my ribs.

“I take it the Gadfly was down there,” one of the guards said sympathetically. I grunted. “Well, at least you found him.”

“Did you learn anything?” the other guard asked, mirth at war with pity.

“A few things,” I said, brushing past them.

“Griffon!”

“How did it go?”

The little king and his sentinel dropped the branches they’d been sparring with in a nearby mountain grotto and sprinted my way. The guards had been reluctant enough to let me through under the supposition that I was seeking Socrates, a man that I apparently had good reason to be searching for. The boys, unfortunately, hadn’t had a chance.

Now they made up for it by peppering me with questions and jumping at my shoulders. I staggered back a step as they hit me, the little king rolling his eyes at my theatrics. It wasn’t the first time I had pretended they had more sway over me than they did, after all.

He became slightly more concerned when I hunched over and coughed, splattering my blood across the mountain trail.

“You’re hurt! You’re actually hurt! Was it the Gadfly? Is he chasing you?”

“Get off him first,” the little sentinel hissed, yanking his brother down off my shoulder. The two boys circled worriedly around me, casting wary glares back at the entrance to the center of the mountain. Then Sol stepped out, both guards wordlessly parting as he passed. The boys edged behind me.

“Is that…”

“The revenant?”

Ah, right. That’s what Lefteris called him.

“Boys,” I said once I had stopped spitting blood. They looked up. “Can you find your guardian?” They exchanged a startled look.

“We told you, he’s-”

“I won’t tolerate a lie, and I’m running out of patience for misdirection,” I said roughly. The little sentinel bit his lip. The little king gazed back in defiance for as long as he could.

Sol came to stand behind me, looking down on him neutrally.

Little Leo flinched and looked away. “We can,” he muttered, and reached for a golden thread tied around his left wrist.

Sol and I watched, fascinated, as the golden thread unraveled from around his wrist and then snapped taut, as if an invisible hand was pulling the other end of it. It swiveled and pointed southwest down the mountain.

“Go,” I commanded them, and both boys visibly fought the desire to tell me no. It had been one thing for them to tag along when they thought they wouldn’t get caught. Then, when Kyno and his crocodile had caught them out, they’d comforted themselves with the knowledge that at least I’d be there with them when Lefteris found out.

But here and now, I was telling them to track him down themselves. Alone. There would be no softening the blow if they did, and they both knew it.

“You offered to face the Gadfly with me in exchange for my tutelage, and I told you it wasn’t enough,” I said, swallowing back blood as I knelt in front of them. “Have you realized why yet? It’s because you wanted to do that. It would have cost you nothing. If the two of you truly want to be my students, go find your guardian and tell him what you’ve done. Stand tall when he rages. Do not falter. And bring him back to Elissa’s home by any means necessary. Do that, and I’ll teach you mongrel children a thing or two about justice.”

It was interesting, watching them work through the dilemma of their circumstances with one another. I wondered, distantly, if Socrates had felt this way when Sol and I faced him in his cave.

They reached a decision. Leo inhaled a deep breath, offering his brother the back of his fist.

“With me?”

“Always,” Pyr said, rapping the back of his own fist against it.

“We’ll have him back by sundown,” Leo promised, gripping his golden thread tight. With that, the two boys turned and went bounding down the mountain steps, their guardian’s thread leading the way.

Sol frowned. “What was that?”

“There’s a vast expanse of things you don’t know, Sol,” I said. He rolled his eyes as we both turned down the mountain. “And even more that our companions have kept from us. Out of fear, out of paranoia-”

A soft whistle in the wind heralded the breaking of a veil once the guards were out of sight, and Sol’s toy soldiers stepped out of the open air beside us.

“-and out of shame,” I finished, glancing sidelong at Scythas and Jason. The wind walker glared but didn’t utter a word, while the disgraced captain of the seas avoided my gaze entirely. For a moment, I tried to imagine Nikolas in their place. A Hero cowed by a pair of lowly Philosophers.

“What’s so funny?” Scythas grit out. I shook my head, fighting my good humor. As I was currently, laughter would only lead to me spitting more blood.

“Nothing,” I said, smiling. “Just you.”

“Scythas, Jason.” Sol said. The Heroes bit their tongues and sheathed their rising ire. “Can you find the others? We need to talk.”

“All of us,” I added.

“We can,” Scythas reluctantly said. Sol considered the shorter hero. He sighed.

“Go.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall nodded wordlessly. The two vanished, stepping once more into the wind.

“What are you playing at, Griffon?” Sol asked me as we descended the stairway to heaven.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

A gaggle of children, no less young for the fact that each of them were in the Sophic Realm, eyed us curiously as we stepped off the stairway and through the arched gateway separating the Raging Heaven from Olympia. They waited for us with veiled impatience - the stairway to heaven was only wide enough for one man to walk it at a time. Once I had passed, and then Sol behind me, they went bounding up the steps - each chasing the other’s heels.

Sol and I watched them go. Finally, my worthless Roman brother spoke the words that were on both of our minds.

“I want to know.”

“Want to know what?” I asked blithely, as if I wasn’t suffering the same desire.

We continued on into the Half-Step City, into grand streets wide enough for three drawn carts to pass without fear of collision. The city was alive as it always was, the muted noise of the Storm That Never Ceased giving way to the thunder of humanity, hundreds of men and women doing hundreds of different things wherever you happened to look. Within minutes of leaving Kaukoso Mons I spotted a man hawking swill and calling it spirit wine, more than a dozen hetairai beckoning men and women alike from their balconies and perfumed shops, and even a group of street performers with drums and flutes and, for some reason, a snake slithering along to their beat.

“A subordinate of mine once told me that a man is entitled to his own demons, if nothing else,” Sol said as we passed beneath an arch of tangled boughs, the product of two trees on either side of the road reaching out to one another. “Whether you’re a soldier or a mystiko, or just a man trying to provide, there will always be superiors and dependants vying for your time, your attention - and your secrets.”

I hummed, watching a pair of street rats edge towards a man selling fruit. The boy’s skin clung to his ribs, outlining each one, and the girl’s cheeks were devoid of the fat a child her age should have. Without breaking stride, I manifested a hand of pankration intent and snapped its fingers loudly beside the merchant’s ear. The man flinched and whipped around, cursing at a nearby loiterer. The urchins lunged out of the shadows and grabbed as many figs and pears from the baskets at his feet as they could carry, dashing into a nearby alley with their spoils.

“Every man deserves at least one secret, is that it?” I asked. Sol grunted affirmation. “But you want to know them anyway.”

“I do.” Beside me, he drank in the city with his eyes. There was wonder beneath the thick veneer of Roman contempt. “Aristotle told me stories of Greece, at times - its great Heroes and the arts they inspired, as well as its Tyrants.”

“And? You’ve met my father, and more Heroic souls here than whores in a symposia. Has it been everything you thought it would be?”

Unconsciously, against his better efforts, Sol sneered.

“Your father is exactly what Aristotle warned me a Tyrant could be,” he said. “But the heroes we’ve met are wrong. And there’s a part of me that can’t help but wonder-”

“If our companions aren’t what they’re meant to be, because the Tyrants in their lives are.” I finished his thought for him, because it was my thought as well.

“That part of me wants to know,” he said, “even though it has no right.”

We passed through the grand agora, citizens and philosophers of all ages parting unconsciously from our path as Sol’s riptide influence guided them out of the way. I held out a hand and let it pass through the eerie currents of the fountain where we’d recruited Jason and Elissa weeks ago, streamers of water simply falling up into the sky before returning to the earth.

“What right do we need to seek the truth?” I asked, flicking the moisture from my fingers and watching it spiral up into the air to rejoin with the fountain. “What right do we need for anything at all, so long as we can take it for ourselves?”

“These aren’t knuckles in a game of dice,” Sol said, irritated. “There’s no reward for taking everything you can from the world around you. These are real people, living and breathing just like you. If they want to keep the worst of their suffering to themselves, why shouldn’t we let them?”

I scoffed, and he glanced sharply at me. Worthless Roman, if you wanted me to reassure you that your first impulse was just, all you had to do was ask.

“Because if I observed such pitiful courtesy, you’d still be a slave in chains,” I told him, and saw his relief in the ebbing of the storm.

“This is different,” he said, because nothing could ever be easy with him. “You’re not doing this for them.” I threw an arm across his shoulder, knocking the side of my head against his.

“And who said any of this was for you?” I asked him airily, slapping aside his halfhearted attempt to push me away. “You and Socrates both, lecturing me as if I don’t understand the difference between a man and a mound of clay. What does it matter that my actions are selfish at their core if they’re what the other party needs?”

“The intent doesn’t matter,” Sol mused.

“Not when outcome is king,” I agreed. He inhaled sharply and nodded.

“Right. Then if we’re going to do this, we have to make certain we leave them better off than we found them.”

“Will that absolve you of your guilt?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow. “Dragging their demons out of them, unearthing whatever it was that made them this way to satisfy your own curiosity - will you be able to justify it if they walk away hating you? So long as they’re stronger for having suffered it?”

For all that the last son of Rome sought refuge in apathy, he couldn’t fool me. And whatever his intent had been when we stepped off the Eos and into the sanctuary city, the outcome was attachment. Against his best efforts, Sol had grown fond of these destitute Heroes and their troubled cult in the weeks since we’d met them. Whether it was sympathy or camaraderie hardly mattered. He had claimed them within himself, consciously or not, and that meant claiming their troubles as well.

How could I know that? It was obvious.

I’d done the same exact thing.

“They'll hate us regardless once they figure out what we really are,” he said wearily. “The least we can do is give them some peace in exchange for their turmoil.”

“The least we can do is nothing at all,” I corrected him. “That is the least of what we will do. And personally, I have no intention of stopping there.”

He glanced at me in askance.

“My cousin was a Philosopher when he left the Scarlet City, and he was alone. When he came back to wed his woman he was a Hero. Do you remember how many companions they brought with them?”

“Six,” he said promptly, having been one of the slaves to prepare their accommodations at the time. “Eight in all.”

“Eight in all, each of them Heroes.”  I nodded. “Something you couldn’t possibly have known as a slave is that three of those companions were there for his wife, and three were there for him. Two groups of four joined by their union.”

“Get to the point.”

“Impatient wretch,” I said, tightening the arm around his shoulder into a headlock. “Why do you think it is that all the best stories are about parties and crews? Even the Muses know it’s better that way. For every Hero that can stand alone against a Tyrant, there are three more that can only do it together.

“There’s strength in numbers. Strength in justice,” I added, raising fingers one at a time. “My cousin carved out his name with a crew of four. Tessera - that’s justice. His wife did the same with a party of the same size, and that’s justice as well. In their union they created a covenant of eight Heroic souls, justice twice over. Something far greater than the sum of its parts.”

The muscles in Sol’s jaw flexed. Of course, there was no grand realization on his part. Just as I had known all along what he was thinking, so too had he known my intentions.

“Scythas, Jason, and Anastasia,” he said, reciting the names of those he’d claimed as his own.

“Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris,” I responded in kind.

“What makes you think they want that kind of arrangement? What makes you think they’d be able to stomach one another even if they did? We have no idea what it is they’re here to accomplish, only that they’ve come from every corner of the free Mediterranean to compete for it. For all we know, success for one could mean death for the other five.”

“We know that four of them despise their elders enough to take up arms against their crows,” I said, reminding him of the unkindness that had led to our meeting with Socrates. “We know that Scythas is more eager to help you now than you ever were to help me as my slave.”

Sol’s eyes rolled. “And Lefteris?”

“What Lefteris wants hardly matters,” I said slyly. “Because he’d put his boys above it anyway.”

“And you have them eating out of your open hand.” He sighed. “What is the story behind them? They don’t look nearly enough like him to be his children.”

“I only have suspicions.”

“But you know he values them over his own desires,” Sol observed. I hummed, confirming it. “So you’ll blackmail him into joining you, using his dependents as leverage? There’s a word for men that do that.”

“I won’t do anything to his boys,” I said, waving off the thought. “But if the little king and his sentinel decide they want to tag along, I have no reason to refuse them. Besides that, Lefteris has an attachment to Elissa and Kyno as it is. If they go, of course he’ll want to follow. And if the boys are in his ear, begging him to join them too?”

“All of this, just to have some fun?”

“Worthless Roman, I told you before - a thing can be good more than once. Everything I do is for my own enjoyment, as it should be, but that doesn’t mean my fun can’t also serve a greater purpose. You think you’re the only one that’s paid attention to these pitiful Heroes and their rotten, sinking cult? You’re not. Who said my pursuit of the heights had to be at odds with my pursuit of happiness? Why shouldn’t a man be smiling when he catches tribulation lightning in his teeth?”

“I’ll keep that in mind when my journey reaches its end,” he said, dark Roman humor asserting itself in his bleak smirk. I laughed, my internal and external bruises throbbing painfully as I did.

“You should! I can’t think of anything more terrifying than a Roman with a smile on his face. The dogs won’t stand a chance.”

He snorted. “There’s still a flaw in your grand design.”

“Ho?”

“You want to form a Heroic party, but we’re not even Heroes yet.”

Ahead of us, a man visibly past his prime cursed as the press of the crowds forced him into Sol’s path, shoulders knocking together. He stumbled back, and a Philosopher’s influence washed over us as his pneuma rose in outrage. A Philosopher of the third rank.

“Bastard-!” he seethed, catching his balance and squaring his shoulders.

Sol stared steadily at the man, and I raised an eyebrow beside him.

The man faltered. The eyes on us grew in number, citizens stopping to take notice of a brewing conflict, and I allowed my violent intent to manifest itself without the flames to make it visible. The Philosopher flinched.

“Watch yourself,” he spat, and Sol allowed him the token attempt at maintaining some standing. The senior cultivator stalked away as fast as he could without running.

I glanced at Sol.

“Does it matter?”

1.53

Hero of the Alabaster Depths

When Jason was six years old, his father sat him on his shoulders while they sailed into a cyclone and told him it was time he learned about standing.

Standing, or reputation as the mortals called it, was something any man could understand whether he was a cultivator or not. But, as with most things, its significance increased along with pneuma. Standing was what contrasted a man from his peers. In a financial sense, standing was the difference between the man that cleaned stables for a living, and the man that owned those stables. In a physical sense, it was the man that sat front row for every wrestling match his city put on, contrasted with the man that was in the pits competing.

Jason had been young then, and terrified of the approaching storm. The panicked hollering of his fathers crew hadn’t helped. So his father had provided him with an even simpler example to illustrate the point.

The Reaver That Broke the Loom had stepped up onto the Golden Thread’s figurehead, a winged boy with a noose around his throat, and forced Jason to look behind them. Below, at the men roaring against the waves. He forced Jason to watch as his crew gnashed their teeth and wrenched their oars through the sea. Veins bulging, chests heaving for breath. All while Jason’s father stood above them, at the top of the ship’s hierarchy in every way that mattered.

Even a pirate knows the way of things, the Reaver had said, before turning back to face the storm.

A slave knew his place when the freedman spit in his face. A freedman knew his place when the metic chased him from his wares. The metic knew his place when the citizen sneered at his petty wealth. The citizen knew his place when the aristocrat humiliated him in the agora.

And the aristocrat knew his place when the tyrant took him in hand.

A cultivator was no different. A cultivator labored under the same hierarchy, only more so. The Reaver’s men were each cultivators of infamously high standing, men that could do unspeakable things with nothing but their own vital essence and whatever was at hand. Yet there they labored, fighting the wrathful sea while Jason looked down on them all. He was hardly a cultivator at all back then, and a child besides. But they labored for his benefit nonetheless.

Why do you think that is, little rat? his father had asked, and Jason had fought the terror of the coming storm just long enough to answer.

Because you told them to.

The Reaver laughed, and said that he was exactly right.

Jason sat on the captain’s shoulders, his standing greater than anyone else on the Golden Thread, because his father had decided it would be so. And no one on that ship questioned his father.

His father had told him they could push the crew further. At Jason’s confused look, he’d elaborated - perhaps on top of laboring so Jason wouldn’t have to, and speaking to him with the respect a superior was due, his father could have them share their rations of food and drink with him as well. Or he could go beyond that - he could demand that each of them pay a portion of their wages to the Reaver’s son as a sign of deference.

Caught between terror and bewilderment, Jason had asked why his father would ever treat the Golden Thread’s crew so poorly. These were men that Jason had grown up admiring. These were the men he had dreamed of rowing beside when his father finally deemed him fit to join them. Why would he treat them like slaves?

Why wouldn’t I? his father had asked in turn. That’s what they are, in the end. That’s what every man that stands below you is. Why not fleece them for everything they can give you?

Scandalized, yet knowing the kind of man his father was even back then at six years old, Jason gave him the only answer he could. The only answer that the Reaver would possibly accept.

They’ll mutiny.

A roar had gone up then, a chorus of voices raised in vehement agreement. The crew had been listening, and they didn’t hesitate to chime in. His father had only smirked and nodded in satisfaction.

Standing is what separates greater existences from their lessers. Once you become a man worth talking about, standing becomes renown, renown becomes glory.

Kleos. The divine hierarchy that governed them all.

However, the nature of kleos was that of a ladder. Every great man started at the lowest rung. His father could place him at the top of the financial hierarchy, the social hierarchy, even the political hierarchy - but no man could climb the divine ladder in his son’s place. And if you were on the ladder, you were a rung to everyone else. There to be grasped, there to be stepped on.

It was natural for man to fear the heights. It was terrifying to reach for that next rung, knowing the man you would have to step over to get to it. That fear won out over every man eventually. Whether it was as a Citizen, as a Philosopher, as a Hero - even as a Tyrant. Eventually, every man decided that what was required to reach the next rung was more than he was willing to risk. That was how you kept a crew of significant men. That was how you kept a portion of the world docile beneath your thumb.

But every man has his limit, and it’s the Captain’s job to know it. Press as close as you like to that line in the sand, it makes no difference. Every man below you is a willing slave until you cross his line. It’s only once you cross it that you’re inviting mutiny into your ship.

No matter how many years passed, Jason would never shake the feeling that the king below the waves had sent that storm personally. And though his men urged the Reaver to turn back, though any other captain would have fled long ago, his father had held them true to course. The Reaver That Broke the Loom had stood defiant against the rain and the wind.

When the time comes for you to bite the hand that feeds you, don’t you dare hesitate, his father had said. And when you are the captain and the first of your men comes for your place on the ladder, remember this:

Once he’s crossed his line in the sand, you’re nothing to that man but another tribulation.

Jason clamped a hand down on the scarlet son’s wrist and dragged it roughly away from Sol and the Oracle. Burning hands of Griffon’s violent intent punched and clawed their way into existence, each one aiming for a different vulnerable spot on his body. Behind, Scythas whistled sharply and a gale enveloped Jason as well as Solus and Scarlet Oracle, deflecting and dispersing the worst of the attack.

Since that very first moment he’d laid eyes on Solus’ student, Jason had known he was a threat to everyone around him. He’d seen it as soon as he walked into that club. Griffon had been staring down Alazon, a Heroic Young Aristocrat of the Raging Heaven, as easily as he would a vagrant beggar. Jason had known it then, like he knew the rolling of the ocean beneath his feet.

Griffon had glanced at him, over to Anastasia and Scythas, inevitably settling on his master. But from Alazon to Jason, to Anastatia, and to Scythas, that look in his eyes hadn’t changed. Not once. Not even for a second. Not even when they settled upon Solus himself.

Wherever Griffon‘s line in the sand was, he had left it behind when he crossed the Ionian. To him, every existence on this earth was nothing but a tribulation for him to overcome.

“Control yourself,” Jason said harshly, projecting his voice over the wind. Blazing fists of manifested pneuma pounded at the gale wind shell, ripping and tearing and grasping for purchase. Heedless.

“Griffon,” Solus said quietly. “What are you talking about?”

Every manifested hand slammed against the curtain of wind one more time, all of them at once, and then they vanished. After a cautious beat, Scythas allowed his winds to disperse as well.

Griffon set his sheathed blade against the floor and leaned artfully onto it, blood running rivulets down his forehead and around his eyes. He sneered at the holy woman of his city like she was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen.

“I’ve met eight of the nine oracles since we last spoke, Solus,” he said, deceptively calm. “During your time in the legions, did you ever have the privilege of meeting a holy woman?”

The captain from the west stared hard at his student.

“I did.”

Scythas exhaled a shaking breath behind them.

“Of course you did,” the Griffon that was also the hungry raven said easily. “And when you met her, did she grace you with her majesty?”

Solus grimaced. “Is that what Greeks call it?”

The Oracles tittered and laughed. Jason braced his heart against the simultaneous sensations of drowning, melting, being crushed and hung and turned to stone. Majesty was admittedly a kind word for it.

“So she did,” Griffon said. “And tell me, oh master, was that a sensation you’ll ever forget? Was that an experience you could possibly mistake for a mortal woman’s charm?”

Solus’ silence was answer enough.

“Then believe me when I tell you -” the sword the scarlet son had never bothered to use slammed cleanly through the ivory and gold tile of the floor, sheath and all. His pneuma rose precipitously around him. “- she is not one of them. This pretender is wearing the uniform and mouthing the words, but there is no majesty in her soul.”

“This is where the oracles reside,” Solus said, waving his arm expansively at the late kyrios’ underground courtyard. “She was living here well before the kyrios died. You think he couldn’t tell the difference? The man that spoke to any oracle he wanted, any time he felt the urge?”

“Living with the king doesn’t make you a queen,” Griffon said. Jason’s eyes widened.

“You dare?” Scythas ground out, stalking over to Solus’ other side. He glared furiously at the Griffon, and the Griffon glared right back. “You come here uninvited, unwanted, and make a mess of a great man’s living memory - and you have the audacity to question an Oracle’s right to be here? When you are the intruder?”

“Why not?” Griffon asked with disdain. “No one else was going to.”

“Your master just told you,” Jason said, because Scythas looked too enraged to speak. He’d always been too emotional when it came to the kyrios. “This is hallowed ground in the Raging Heaven Cult. The kyrios never took guests here, never entertained lovers in his private estate. No one but an oracle or the kyrios could possibly live down here.”

“And yet here you are. Here we all are, my master and his crows. I suppose that would make him the kyrios, but what does that leave the three of us?” The narrowed eyes of a predator swept up and down Jason and Scythas, the color of blood and molten heat. “The two of you don’t look like seers to me. I don’t feel like an Oracle, though I suppose I could be wrong.”

“The wind runner is pretty enough for it,” teased the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles.

“Shut up,” Griffon said at once, and all three of the holy women erupted into giggles once again. An utterly bizarre sight, made more so by the fact that one of them looked older than the city of Olympia itself.

“You’re certain of this,” Solus finally said, something formless passing between himself and his student. Nothing that Jason could perceive with a Hero’s limited senses. After a beat, Solus sighed. “Why are you lying to me, Selene?”

The young woman slung over his shoulder, noticeably silent up to this point, blinked and shook herself out of a trance. She looked away from Griffon for the first time since leaving her room, meeting Solus’ eyes with earnesty.

“I’m not,” she said. And then she winced. “Well, not entirely.”

Scythas muttered something under his breath. The words apoplexy and acute brain suffering were all that Jason caught from it, through the barrier of his own disbelief.

“He’s not wrong, then,” Solus observed, and the Oracle’s - the girl’s? - head bobbed in agreement.

“He’s not. However, he’s not right either.”

“Then by all means,” Griffon said, “enlighten me.”

“She isn’t an oracle yet. But she will be.”

Socrates came striding out of the Scarlet Oracle’s quarters, shutting the bone white door behind him with one hand while the other cradled a mangled bust of a woman’s head. Jason caught a glimpse of the room beyond just before the door slammed shut. Everything was as it had been before Solus pulled him out of Scythas’ veil. Somehow, the Gadfly had fixed it all.

The first philosopher gestured irritably with his free hand, and the chunk of marble that he’d thrown at Griffon’s chest leapt across the room. He caught it and pressed it against the partially reformed marble bust of a woman’s head, and when his hand came away it was whole again.

Selene, the girl that may or may not have been an oracle, sighed in relief at the sight.

“Thank you.”

The Gadfly grunted. “Be more discerning about who you invite into your room. And get off the boy’s shoulder already, you look ridiculous.”

Selene flushed. Solus set her down, brow furrowed as he worked over the Gadfly’s words.

“The oracles are meant to be crones,” he said.

“That they are. And do you know why, boy?”

Solus grimaced again. “Men hunger for various things.”

“Wrong,” Griffon said quietly, riveted on the Gadfly.

“Wrong now, but right once upon a time,” the Gadfly corrected him. Idly, Jason wondered how many centuries Solus had spent fighting demons out in the furthest reaches of the West. How long had it been since he’d stepped foot in a free city? “Before we forgot the names of those that came before us, chastity was of prime concern for a seer. Do any of you unruly children know why?”

All three oracles raised their hands. The Gadfly ignored them all.

“Back then,” Selene said softly, “oracles were handpicked by their patron. Blood relation was not needed, and so the divine preferred their hosts to have no relations at all.”

The Gadfly nodded once. “A man I once knew liked to say that an oracle was like a glove for their god, perfectly fitted to their hand. The immortals used them to affect change that a direct touch wasn’t suited for. And what man, mortal or divine, wants to put his hand in a glove that’s filled with seed?”

The Gadfly glanced meaningfully back at the late kyrios’ personal quarters. Jason wished he could say that the line was out of character for the memories he had of the man. But it wasn’t.

“But that was before,” the first philosopher continued. “Now, we cling to what’s left of our divinity with everything we have. There are no patrons left, so we preserve the last spark of those that were chosen through their blood. The oracles are no longer forbidden from breeding - now, they’re required.”

“A holy woman needs an heir,” each of the three Oracles said in eerie unison.

“So we wait until the Oracle has had her child. Then, when her mother has prepared her for her duties and is ready to torment men in the afterlife, she anoints her daughter in prophecy and mystery faith. Then her child’s child begins the search for a proper partner. On and on it goes, until the day we’ve finally wrung the last of the majesty from their blood.”

“Ever so cynical,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide said, the old woman’s cracked lips creasing in her distaste. “We’ve always hated that about you.” The Gadfly ignored her again.

“You’re the daughter of the oracle, then,” Solus said.

“I am,” she said sadly.

“Then where is she?” Griffon demanded. “I came to this festering city to see the Oracle. Where do I have to go to find her?”

Jason answered before he could think better of it. “Old Zalus’ domain.”

The Gadfly’s hand lashed out, rhetoric that Jason could not possibly hope to counter seething in his palm. Jason stoked the flames of his heroic spirit, called upon the Muse that wouldn’t answer, and all of it was too late, too slow. In vain.

[I'll find another, better o-]

The Gadfly smacked him over the head.

“Some things don’t need to be said just because you can say them,” the Gadfly rebuked him with a scowl. Jason raised a hand to his head. Somehow, his skull was still intact. It hadn’t even cut the skin. “After all you’ve seen this foolish child do, you thought it would be wise to give him information like that?”

Jason opened his mouth to argue. Then he thought about what he’d just said, and to whom.

He closed his mouth.

“Don’t even think about it,” the Gadfly said, dismissing him and rounding on Solus’ student. Fortunately, Griffon was still leaning on his sword and hadn’t gone running off to challenge a Tyrant in his domain. Yet. “You’ve come to see the Scarlet Oracle? To seek her wisdom? You can’t.”

Griffon stared steadily at him.

“No, not even then,” the Gadfly said, answering the unspoken challenge. “Even if you managed to infiltrate his domain, defy all his ethos, it wouldn’t change a thing. She won’t speak to you because she can’t speak to you.”

Griffon considered that for a long, tense moment. “Why?”

He asked Selene. Not the Gadfly.

“... The day that I was born, my mother fell asleep and never woke up again.” It was a disgraceful act to look upon an oracle’s unveiled face, disrespectful in the most blasphemous sense. But Jason found himself looking anyway. Here, leaning against Solus as she was with her hair and silks in disarray, she looked hardly like an oracle at all. It made the sorrow on her face even more painful to see. “They say that the last thing she did was name me, and then I fell right out of her arms. It happened so suddenly that my father had to catch me. She just collapsed back into the sheets, dead to the world. She hasn’t stirred since.”

“An illness?” Griffon asked. She shook her head.

“Nothing that the physicians had a name for. Certainly nothing they could cure.”

“She’s been asleep for sixteen years?” Solus prompted her, though not unkindly. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She nodded miserably, leaning further into his side. Across from them Griffon’s eyes narrowed, his fingers flexing unconsciously.

He turned the weight of his gaze and his pneuma both on the Gadfly.

“But you know.”

The Gadfly considered him. “I know nothing.”

Griffon spat at his feet.

“When you first saw Griffon,” Solus said, with that same distance from before. Working through a puzzle only a Tyrant could see. “You said something. A word with significance.”

“Sunkissed,” Selene whispered. “I recognized the memory he showed us.”

“This is justice. Remember its face.” Jason shivered.

“You’ve seen that corpse before?” Solus asked. She shook her head.

“Not in person, no. But I knew it anyway. My father used to tell me that we were all blessed by the sun - me, and him, and my mother. It’s why our hair is the color of the zenith. It’s why we have the dawn and the dusk in our eyes. I was blessed by the sun through my mother, who was blessed through her mother, who was blessed through her mother before.”

“You said your father was blessed, too,” Solus observed. “Are you saying…”

“That the roots of her family tree are an Ouroboros?” the Gadfly interjected, crossing his arms. “No. Polyzalus is no oracle’s son.”

“Then how -” Solus stopped himself. Understanding bloomed. “Sunkissed.”

Selene nodded shallowly. “When my father still lived in the Scarlet City, on the western mountain range, he went down alone to where the Burning Dusk’s mystery was kept. In that cavern, on that day, the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god blessed him. It pressed a kiss upon his brow. When he emerged from the mountain, he looked like heaven itself had painted him with an entirely different pallet.”

“You mean-” Scythas said.

“That memory was real?” Jason demanded.

Griffon spared them both a scornful glance. “My virtuous heart doesn’t lie.”

But that was- to touch a greater mystery of the world-

“Can it be fixed?” Solus asked the Gadfly. “The Oracle’s affliction. Can she be woken up?” Selene, for her part, dipped her head further, her golden hair shading her face in place of a veil.

“I already told you,” she whispered.

“She can.”

The Scarlet Oracle’s daughter whipped her head up, and her Heroic pneuma flooded the courtyard.

“What? What?” she demanded, her voice rising along with her pneuma. The scarlet flames in her eyes blazed.  “Is this funny to you?”

“It’s not,” the Gadfly said, weathering the blazing heat of her pneuma with nothing but a faint grimace.

“You said she couldn’t be cured. It wasn’t just the physicians that said it, it wasn’t just the other oracles. You said it! Every time I ever asked, you told me you couldn’t do it!”

“I said those things before. But I’m not saying them now,” the Gadfly said. Solus quickly turned the arm he had around the girl’s shoulders into a restraint when she made to lunge, cheeks flushed and eyes wide with outrage.

“You lied!” she accused him. “All these years, you lied to me! You lied!”

“You lied!” The three Oracles chorused in joyful spite. Their majesty rippled through the room with every repetition. “You lied! You lied! You lied!”

“The kyrios lied.”

They all fell silent.

The Gadfly raised the bust of a woman’s head still held in his hand, turning it so they could all observe her features. Even without color, it was impossible to mistake her for anything other than the mother of the girl in the sun ray silks.

“An oracle is a divine existence, even if only in the slightest of degrees,” he said with solemn intonation. “That’s why they live such long lives. That’s why nature preserves them. Any illness that can overcome their majesty, then, must itself be divine. There are only two things known to man that can cure a divine affliction.”

“Nectar and ambrosia,” Griffon said, utterly focused on the philosopher.

“Nectar and ambrosia,” Socrates agreed. “And since the day you were born, who is the only man on this earth that has demonstrated the ability to refine such a substance?”

Steam drifted up around Selene’s burning eyes, tears turned to vapor before they could be shed.

“Why?” she asked. A multitude of questions housed in a single word.

“Why didn’t he offer your father a cure if he knew he had it? Why did he lie to you every time you asked him? Why was the kyrios the man that he was?” The Gadfly sighed. “There isn’t a wise man alive that could answer any of those questions.”

“But the kyrios is dead,” Solus said, “and he took his nectar and his ambrosia with him.”

“He did,” the Gadfly agreed.

“So what does it matter?” Selene asked. But now, mixed with the bitterness and the anger, there was an undercurrent of hope. “He was the only one that could create it, wasn’t he?” The holy girl begged him with her eyes to disprove her. And so he did.

“During his time here, the kyrios was the only man in the free Mediterranean to synthesize divine sustenance, largely because he felt it was proper that that be the case. He was never the only man capable of following this process.”

“You know,” Griffon said, a vicious smile revealing his teeth. “Worthless old man. Just say it.”

Socrates scoffed. “Old I may be, but I’m worth far more than you.”

“Well?” Selene pressed, gripping Solus’ restraining arm tightly. The scarlet flames in her eyes flickered. “Can you create it?”

The Gadfly muttered something under his breath, and tossed the bust of Selene’s mother away so he could rummage through a fold in his tunic. A hand of manifested intent caught it out of the air, rotating it slowly while Griffon looked it over. The Gadfly pulled a folded piece of papyrus out and flicked it at the captain from the west. Solus caught it between two fingers and shook it open, revealing a map of the free Mediterranean.

A map of the free Mediterranean that was covered in markings.

“What is this?” Solus asked while Jason, Scythas, and Selene crowded around the map.

“No matter how much the late kyrios enjoyed prodding me with questions, I was never close enough in his confidence to share his recipes and refinement techniques with. No one was. However, it’s common knowledge that he mastered this process and discovered these materials during his time as a Hero. What is less commonly known, but still within the scope of my understanding, is how he spent his years in the Heroic Realm. And where.”

“So if we follow his steps,” Selene said excitedly, hope and joy finally overtaking outrage and doubt. “If we look where he’s been-!”

“We’ll find what he found,” Griffon said, placing the bust of Selene’s mother into her hands. She hugged it tightly to her chest, more steam drifting from the corners of her eyes. Griffon shouldered Scythas aside, the Hero of the Scything Squall gritting his teeth but making space. Side-by-side, the captain from the west and his student considered the map of the late kyrios’ epic.

“This will work? You’re certain?” Selene asked in a hitching voice.

“Nothing is certain,” the Gadfly said gruffly. Then, to Solus and his student: “But this is as good a use of your time as any. You’ve both proven today that you’re not fit for a horse’s stable, let alone a city full of civilized people. Take the map and begon from my sight. Go be a problem for the rest of the world while I think about what to do with you.”

“Where do we start?” Griffon asked Solus without hesitation, following the finger his master was tracing across the map. He added his own finger, jabbing at a particular marking as they exchanged another silent conversation.

The Gadfly jabbed his own finger to the papyrus, a small mark of liquid gold.

“You’ll go here first.” he declared, leaving no room for argument. “Of all the conjectures associated with the kyrios’ recipe, one element has always been constant. Go here and find me a golden cup filled with spirit wine. Return it to me without spilling a drop. I, your grandfather, will handle the rest.”

Selene answered for them, wedged in between the two and smiling like the sun.

“We will!”