sunslammers

1.52 [Jason]

Hero of the Alabaster Depths

What distinguished a hero from a man?

[Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]

Back then, he’d been certain that he knew. Every time they took up oars, each of those among his crew, and heaved against the fickle waves. The tang of the air and the rolling of the ocean, randy sea shanties and laughter filling the sails. On days like those, he could have sworn that his epic was just over the horizon.

But all he’d found on the other side was black sails and howling whirlpools. Whatever had washed up to shore afterwards was no hero. It was hardly a man at all.

Jason had forgotten what a Hero was meant to be years ago  - the alabaster sea had taken it from him. The demons had raked their claws through his soul and devoured what they found, and they’d hollowed out his heart. The man that the ocean had spit back out onto the shores of the greater Mediterranean could hardly remember the feel of an oar in his hands, let alone whatever it was he thought he had seen just over that far horizon.

Life at the Raging Heaven hadn’t helped. He hadn’t thought that it would, of course, hadn’t thought much of it at all outside of it being close at hand and within his means to join. He would have gone anywhere at that time, so long as he didn’t have to cross salt water to get there. But even a husk had eyes. And a hollow heart had twice the room for outrage when it came to the whims of rivalrous Tyrants.

Impotent outrage, that was. That was the most a man could ever feel towards the elders of the Raging Heaven. A mortal man or a Hero, it hardly mattered. They all fell in line. Jason was no exception. He fell. Fell in line, fell from grace. Fell, fell, fell to the bottom of the sea.

And then the Crows came.

Something changed that night. Nothing tangible, certainly nothing he could grasp. But ever since the Crows had nearly returned him to the Icarus on the night of the kyrios’ funeral, ever since he had been saved, the urge to fight had appeared at the corners of his vision. Gone whenever he turned to look, but always there.

The captain of the Icarus was still drowning, but his feet had started to kick.

And at times, times like these, he could almost imagine that whatever the sea and her demons had taken from him, whatever lay beyond that far horizon -

“This is justice,” my father told me. The bisected corpse of the fallen sun god reached up and laid its incomprehensible palm over my eyes. “Remember its face.”

- Griffon and Sol had come here to remind him of it.

A thunderous impact jarred him from the unearthly vision, along with Scythas beside him. They both watched in disbelief as the Gadfly staggered back into the room. Jason hurriedly stepped right while Scythas stepped left, each making space for him. The man that had defied the Tyrants of the Coast, lived to spit their own poison back in their eyes, gagged and gripped his neck.

Griffon had punched the Scholar in the throat.

“Socrates!” he greeted, arresting the momentum of his mad dash down into the heart of the mountain with thirty burning hands of his own intent. “Or should I say, master. I’ve come to thank you for your guidance!”

The Hero from the Rosy Dawn straightened up out of his striking stance, resting one hand negligently on the pommel of his sheathed blade. The Gadfly inhaled a single sharp breath, his expression murderous, and the scarlet son bared his teeth in a wild grin.

“Reckless, arrogant-”

Jason eased back another step, and - no. No. He wouldn’t run away. He wouldn’t spend another second drowning. He spat at the ground by the Gadfly’s feet and took hold of the blood burning inside his heart. Across from him, Scythas whistled a low note and his pneuma whirled.

“- children,” The Gadfly finished, his tone severe. “Who told you that memory was yours to share? Who told you that you were allowed in this place?”

“Ho, it seems the philosopher has lost his way,” Griffon jeered. Striding forward, towards the danger. As he had before and as he always did. Towards that far horizon. “Thinking I need anyone to tell me anything at all. Allow this humble sophist to educate you on the truth of things. Atten-”

Griffon stopped short, just outside of the doorway to the room. His pneuma flickered and vanished from the room, the grasping hands of his intent disappearing in an instant. Without a word, he dismissed the Gadfly entirely.

The Hero of the risen sun and the Scarlet Oracle stared at one another. Slung over Solus’ shoulder as she was, the Oracle was at eye level with the man. Face-to-face like this, hardly a foot apart, they almost-

Jason squinted. Scythas’ whistle faltered.

Sol tilted his head.

[Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]

“Sunkissed,” spoke the Scarlet Oracle. Griffon blinked at the holy woman that Solus had thrown over his shoulder like a bundle of tangled line. “You must be Griffon.”

A fist-sized chunk of broken marble broken off from a bust by Jason’s soul - in that split second that he’d allowed the anger and the shame to drag him back down to the Icarus - slammed into Griffon’s chest and threw him back out into the courtyard. The Gadfly slapped the marble dust from his palms, each clap an echoing sound.

“Look where they must not be, and there you’ll find them,” he said, irritated. “Which of them did you tell first, boy?”

Solus frowned, distracted.

“Boy.”

“Griffon,” he said, though whether it was an answer to the Gadfly’s question or a personal realization, Jason couldn’t tell. Surely, something like that…

“And how long did it take him to spread the news around?” the Gadfly demanded. He turned first to Scythas, who kept his grimacing silence.

Then the Gadfly rounded on Jason, and he was forced to invoke the only strength he could still trust.

Euterpe, he called, desperate as the weight of the wise man’s years was leveled against him. He reached for that joyful melody, the sound of the Muse’s flute and the brush of her flower crown against his brow.

He found nothing. His hollow heart stuttered in his chest.

“Is that the face of a man with something to say?” the Gadfly asked, stepping to him and pressing him back a step with his barrel chest. Old man, they called him, as if the hoplite would never return. Salt and shifting winds, as if he’d ever left. “How did you get here? Who told you to come?”

Without a muse to inspire him, without a crew he could call his own, what separated a man from a hero? What made him anything at all? Jason’s focus wavered, and was drawn in by another. Solus drew his eyes as surely as a sail. He didn’t speak, but the storm in his eyes spoke for him.

[Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]

“No one,” he answered, defiance straightening his spine.

“No one. So why are you here?”

“Because I made a promise to the man you took, and I broke it when I let you take him,” he said, and flashed his alabaster fang. “I’m here to balance that scale.”

Jason stoked the flames of what remained and prepared himself to die.

“Enough.” A strong hand came down on Jason‘s shoulder, the captain from the west interposing himself between Jason and the Gadfly.

Jason leaned back, lest the Scarlet Oracle’s head collide with his own while Solus swung her around.

“You did this to yourself, walking me down the mountain like a prisoner,” Solus said, meeting the Gadfly’s glare without any particular fear. “Of course we were seen. What did you expect to happen?”

“I expected the younger generation to possess at least one functioning mind,” the Gadfly said acerbically. He rapped the knuckles of his hand against Solus’ forehead. “And I had hoped that they might share it amongst themselves. I see now that my optimism outweighed my sense.”

“A lesson is learned,” the captain said blandly. The Gadfly sneered.

Without warning, the imposing messenger eagle perched on Solus’ arm spread its wings wide, head turning to the open doorway. It snapped its beak once, twice, the virtuous beast’s savage pneuma buffeting the air as it beat its wings. Sol frowned, and after a moment’s consideration walked wordlessly out of the room.

Leaving Jason and Scythas with the Gadfly.

Jason exchanged a look with his fellow Hero, and both cultivators made a mad dash after the captain. The Gadfly let them go, muttering to himself as he surveyed the wrecked room. Outside they found Solus and the Scarlet Oracle, along with Griffon and the rest of the holy women that Scythas had so carefully veiled them past -

He dug his heels into the baked-clay mosaic winding out from the Oracle’s quarters, Scythas coming to a similarly abrupt stop beside him as the full weight of the courtyard’s inhabitants hit them all at once.

“This-” he gasped, stoking his heart flame for lack of any other defense. The overwhelming presence, presences, the excruciating majesty of three sovereign souls pressing down on him from on high. It hadn’t been like this before.

Griffon lay in the rubble of a holy tripod across the courtyard, sprawling almost as if in leisure. The broken mound of what had once been a hallowed instrument propped him up, the wreckage of the supporting pillar behind serving as a cradle for his head. He had one hand raised to his face, covering most of it but for a narrowed scarlet eye. His other hand was still on the pommel of his sword. Even now, he refrained from drawing it.

Three Oracles knelt on priceless garments, surrounding him. The sources of the suffocating majesty, the pressure that had not been there before. First, the Oracle of the Broken Tide, ancient and so casually cruel, smirked as she brushed the blood from his forehead. Second, the Oracle of Jason’s own home, flighty and so wickedly manipulative, murmured softly while combing delicate fingers through his golden hair. And third, the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis, stern and so mercilessly honest, clicked her tongue as she pressed the folded silk of her veil against a bleeding gouge where the rubble had cut him.

There was a reason that Oracles kept the company of tyrants and heroes, kings and their forgotten sons - beyond the political maneuvering, beyond the logistical concerns, the problem with seeking out a seer was their presence. The aura of a woman whose body functioned as a divine vessel could kill a mortal man outright.

It was within their power to control, of course, in the same way that a Tyrant could speak to his lowest Citizen without the weight of his voice crushing their spine. But asking an Oracle to mind her majesty while about her holy work? It wasn’t possible. The majesty was the work. It was the entire point, after all. And it was a sensation as profound as it was terrifying.

It hadn’t been like this when Jason and Scythas slipped into the courtyard just minutes prior. The Oracles had been chatting idly while Solus did calisthenics and the Scarlet Oracle kept count of his repetitions. It had been as plain a sight as any, reminiscent of the days and nights he’d spent at the dock towns and their markets while between voyages. Heckling and gossipping while going about their casual business.

Now, Jason averted his eyes as the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis turned to regard him, as the sound of hissing snakes filled his ears and the eerie sensation of her majesty slithered across his body. Dread, instinctual and severe, told him not to look. A dormant instinct cried out from the bottom of the sea, the bubbles carrying its voice to the surface of his mind.

Don’t look into the Aegis. You’ll die!

Now, Jason’s knees bent as his city’s holy woman, the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles, settled her attention on him. The burn of her majesty threatening to melt his skin like wax, and the nauseating weightlessness of falling, falling, strings of gold coiling around his neck-

Stay down, stay down. You’ll die!

Now, Jason’s heart stopped as the Oracle of the Broken Tide speared him with the tridents in her eyes, and he was dragged once more to the bottom of the sea.

In the comfort of Elissa’s home, Kyno had described to Jason and the rest of those wrapped up in Solus and Griffon’s schemes what it felt like to seek the Broken Tide’s wisdom. It was something each of them had considered at one point or another since ascending to the Heroic Realm. But none of them had ever gone through with it. By the time they had become existences worthy of an Oracle’s attention, they had lost all desire for it. But Griffon had convinced him, and so they’d gone.

And while the man from the Rosy Dawn had sauntered through the seer smoke and majesty as if it weren’t there, Kyno had told them the truth of it. The Oracle of the Broken Tide drowned you with her majesty. She filled your lungs with it. She carved it into your soul with three prongs.

[Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]

Jason watched dully as his soul sank into the depths where light could not follow. Past the far horizon, where the Icarus lay at rest with her crew. All of them except the captain - the only corpse that belonged with her.

[I’ll find another, better one.]

“You’re greedier by the day,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide chided Griffon, cracked lips curling mischievously. “Was I not enough for you?”

“Were the eight of us not enough for you?” the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis teased him further.

“Perhaps he’s come to ask his question after all,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles mused, twirling a lock of his golden hair around her finger. She leaned in and whispered, quiet as a mouse and loud enough for all to hear. “The one he swore he’d never ask. Has pining overturned your principle yet, oh son of scarlet sin?”

His face covered by a blood-stained and burning hand, Griffon growled a single word.

“Sol.”

The captain from the west knelt in front of his student, that curious distance still about him. His eyes swept across his student in the rubble, the holy women surrounding him, and the holy girl that was still somehow thrown over his shoulder. If he suffered at all beneath the weight of their majesty, he didn’t show it.

Jason supposed a Tyrant wouldn’t.

Griffon stared at his master, and then at the young woman over his shoulder.

“Who is that?”

The seer offered him a smile. “My name is Selene.”

“She’s the Scarlet Oracle,” Solus added.

Griffon snarled and exploded out of his eerie recline in a single motion, throwing off the hands of the three holy women and lashing out. Sorea shrieked and took flight. Jason hissed a curse and Scythas leapt into motion beside him, calling upon the wind.

Solus caught his student’s grasping hand in a thunderclap of sound, their fingers interlocking as the space between them burned with the rosy light of dawn. His eyes narrowed dangerously.

“No,” Griffon snarled, leaning in. The Scarlet Oracle’s eyes widened. “She’s not.”

1.51

The Son of Rome

Jason fell to one knee, staring down at the mess I’d made of Selene’s floor. For her part, the Scarlet Oracle only slapped me lightly on the shoulder for the damage I’d done and rolled her eyes when I mouthed an apology.

“Solus,” Jason said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I - there’s no excuse for my cowardice. Nothing I can say-”

“What cowardice?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, his eyes still wide. The ocean-blue flames behind them were almost fully eclipsed by his pupils.

“What?”

“They can’t read our minds,” Scythas said tiredly, slumped against the wall across from us. “Even if it feels like it at times. You have to be more specific.”

“Are you apologizing,” I asked, “For creeping in under Scythas’ cloak like a stray? Or are you apologizing for staying under it, out of sight, while we spoke to him? For observing us when you knew you could not be observed in kind?”

“I wasn’t apologizing for any of those things,” he admitted, forcing the words out. “But I should have been, and now I am. I should have done this first, before anything else was said here. I'm sorry for that too.” When he clenched his teeth together as if in physical pain, I noticed his right canine was subtly different from the rest. Not a natural tooth at all, but a carved fang of pure white-gold.

I let him work through it alone. Every officer in the legions, from the lowest Tribune to the highest Legate, knew that silence and guilt would draw the words out of a soldier faster than anything an officer could do. You only had to be there, deafeningly loud in your silence, and wait for them to break themselves.

Admittedly, the sight of me sitting on a sixteen year old girl’s lovingly adorned couch while she massaged my shoulders likely took something from the captain’s glare. Fortunately, Jason had risked the ire of every Tyrant on this mountain to sneak down here with Scythas, all so he could confess. It didn’t take much.

“For before,” he said. “For the Gadfly.”

I waited patiently.

“What about the Gadfly?” Selene’s prompted him, not unkindly. The captain of the Alabaster Isles exhaled shakily.

“For not stepping in to help when he grabbed you,” Jason elaborated, striking the knuckles of his left fist against the floor. Every amethyst vein embedded in the marble flashed, for a moment illuminating all four corners of the room. “I should have done something. Not even a full day before, I promised that I would stand by your side, and I did nothing.

“While the Gadfly was on you, I did nothing. While Griffon was heaving himself into danger, I did nothing!” He gripped his head with the other hand, striking the floor again. He seethed. “Against the Scholar himself, shackled to a Philosopher’s strength, Griffon still acted without hesitation. When the Gadfly took you to the mountain, he sprinted after you like Cerberus itself was on his heels!

“And I did NOTHING!”

The flames in Jason‘s eyes blazed like bonfires, spilling out from the confines of his irises. His heroic pneuma roared through the room. Rage and self-loathing overcame control, and I was treated to a glimpse of the pirate’s true strength.

The lights in the room, torches and a lit brazier in the corner, dimmed and faded to bare pinpricks of light. The sound of Scythas cursing and coming to his feet was lost to my ears entirely, registering instead as faint vibrations on my skin. And I watched, with the eyes of my Sophic sense, as his furious influence reached out and crushed a beautifully chiseled bust of a woman’s head to rubble.

I felt more than heard Selene cry out behind me as the bust was crushed. I saw Jason‘s influence lash out again in the time it took my heart to beat once, saw a codex filled with sheets of fine gold in place of papyrus jerk as it was seized by his influence. I saw the bundle of leather and gold cave in on itself a dozen times in a fraction of a second.

Before my heart could beat a second time, hazel-gold light in front of me and scarlet light behind me cut through the darkness. Scythas dove across the room and Selene vaulted over the lounging couch, both of their Heroic souls flaring blindingly bright.

Still, my heart would beat a second time before either of them reached Jason. By then, the strand of the pirate’s influence reaching for me would have found its mark. Two beats and never again.

In that space between the first beat and the second, as a Hero and an Oracle reached out desperately, and as the dread pirate began to rear back in horrified understanding of what he’d done, I finally recognized what it was his influence was doing. An effect I’d only ever heard of secondhand, from my father.

When Gaius was a young man, just twenty-five years old, he was captured by pirates in the Adriatic. This was before he became the man we know him as today, before he was the general of the west. But that man was within him even then. So when the pirates set a young patrician’s ransom for him rather than a general’s, Gaius demanded they raise their price - even went so far as to promise them that he’d see it paid.

While they laughed and obliged him, he promised them another thing too. That he would return some day with a legion at his back, and he would crucify every single one of them for their crimes.

They hardly believed him, of course. But the general of the west always makes good on his promises, doesn’t he? Gaius returned with his legion, just as he promised, and he nailed each and every one of those pirates to a cross.

Ordinarily, there are men within the ranks tasked with concluding a crucifixion. Some use knives, others use swords or barbed whips. The proper way is a spear, I’ve already told you that. One thrust through the heart and justice is rendered. Most days, Gaius is of a similar mind. But these pirates were guilty of crimes of a different magnitude, against more men than Gaius alone. The entire Republic had suffered the burden of their presence in the Adriatic.

So after they had suffered the cross for thirty-eight days, to match the thirty-eight days that Gaius had been in their care, he declared that he would bring them to their victims’ graves - so they could properly atone before they died.

That’s exactly right, Solus. They were pirates - their victims were buried at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. And so Gaius took them there himself, dragging them down into the depths while we watched from the shore.

When he brought them back up their crosses were all shattered, and their bodies had caved in on themselves. As if the gods had taken each of them in hand - and crushed them like rotten figs.

Jason’s influence brushed the tip of my nose, and the dread pirate’s influence dragged me to the bottom of the sea.

Scythas reached him first, tackling him into the far wall and illuminating the room in another flash of amethyst light as the stone absorbed the impact. Selene was next, striking his chest over his heart with the tips of her index and middle fingers - and though the Oracle’s strike was far less explosive, not even strong enough to cause a flicker in the room’s amethyst veins, Jason's pneuma recoiled like a kicked dog. Finally, the man himself reasserted control over the vital essence of his soul, the roaring blue flames in his eyes dimming in a split second.

“Solus!” three heroic cultivators cried out, each of them in fear.

My heart beat a third time. I sucked in a breath and each of them froze, already halfway back across the room. I held it for a moment.

“Jason,” I exhaled.

Gravitas.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles slammed flat against the floor, pressed down by the captain’s virtue. I put everything I had behind it, like I hadn’t done since the days before I was a slave. It had been a year and a half since Tartarus had taken me in its hand like that, since death had whispered its name directly in my ear. My spirit raged in response.

“Control yourself,” I commanded. The words were for myself as much as for him. I hardly heard them over the ringing of my ears.

Jason’s pneuma rushed abruptly back into him. His influence vanished from the room.

“Sol,” Scythas gasped, halfway risen from a sprinter’s crouch.

Selene crossed the remaining distance between us in the blink of an eye, laying one hand flat over my heart while the other gripped my chin and tilted my head back. Her golden veil had been torn from her face at some point, her hair pulled free of its braids by the unreasonable speed of a Heroic cultivator. It spilled over her shoulders and down her back, the sight familiar for reasons I couldn’t describe.

Burning scarlet eyes met mine searchingly. Of all the Heroic cultivators that Griffon and I had encountered in Olympia, she was the only one who knew that I was exactly what I appeared to be. A Sophic cultivator, as the Greeks understood it.

“How?” she whispered. It was a fair question. Even a moment under a wrathful Hero’s influence should have been fatal for a man of my standing. Especially an influence like Jason’s.

I forced shut the snapping jaws of my spirit, wrestling everything down so that the Heroes in the room would only see cool contempt in my expression. But I couldn’t fool Selene. Not while she had her hand pressed against my chest - when she could feel my heart hammering against my ribs at double time.

“I’m not that frail,” I reassured her anyway. When she didn’t seem convinced, I went on, “He only put the Aegean on my shoulders. He could have heaped the Ionian and the Adriatic on as well - it still wouldn’t have been enough to crush me.”

Was I exaggerating? Of course. I had felt my bones flex as Jason’s influence dragged me to the bottom of the sea, felt the pressure force my vital breath from my lungs. Had I stayed there, at his mercy, I had no idea how long I could have borne it before I caved in on myself.

Above all, I was fortunate that his influence had manifested itself as it did. If there was a single thing that I excelled at as a cultivator of the captain’s virtue, it was withstanding pressure.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Jason said, chuckling in helpless relief. He sank fully to the floor, rolling onto his back and laughing out loud. “Of course not! Not you - thank the Muses and the Fates, not you! You’re made of sterner stuff than that.”

I muscled down a cough. Something told me that hacking up blood would ruin his impression of me.

“Reckless bastard,” Scythas growled, turning and laying a kick into his fellow Hero’s side. Jason only laughed harder. “What if you hit the Oracle instead, huh!? Would you still be laughing!?”

Three sharp knocks on the bone-white door silenced them both. Selene’s head whipped up. With one hand still pressed over my heart, she leaned past me and laid her other palm on the door. Her pneuma wound through it in a warm current.

“Who is it?” her voice came out calm, entirely at odds with her wild hair and torn silks.

“Me.”

Selene looked down at me, just a shade past panicked. What do we do? she mouthed, and somehow, the mystery of the Babylonian shard allowed me to read her lips as if she was speaking Latin.

I thought about it. Behind us, Scythas and Jason remained stock still. They didn’t even breathe. Admittedly, they had good reason to be worried.

Scythas knew for a fact that his veil of obstructing wind wouldn’t hold up under the scrutiny of a Tyrant in their domain, nor would it escape the Hurricane Oracle’s gaze. Outside of those known quantities, he’d assured me that he could slip past anyone on this mountain. All except for one. There was one other unknown quantity, a man that Scythas couldn’t gauge one way or another.

Socrates rapped impatiently on Selene’s ivory door. “Send the boy out. You’ve had him in there long enough.”

Scythas had no idea whether or not his veil would hold up under the Gadfly’s scrutiny, and I had no idea how my mentor would react if he caught the two of them sneaking out. Was it worth risking?

If I wasn’t still high off my near miss beneath the waves, my answer might have been yes. Alas.

“You’ve apologized and you’ve thrown a fit,” I addressed Jason, rising to my feet. Draped over me as she had been in order to reach the door, Selene gasped as I lifted her with me, slung over my shoulder. “After you convinced Scythas to smuggle you in here under his power, not yours, and after I pulled you out of the veil myself, because you couldn’t bring yourself to say the first word.”

With every word, I pressed him down. Until the ocean flames behind his eyes were nothing but dull embers.

“Are you satisfied with that?” I demanded, while Socrates hammered on the door. “Is that all your word is worth?”

“No.”

And with the last of my strength, the final scrap that hadn’t been spent resisting his influence and then hammering him to the floor, I pulled him back up. Gravitas forced him to his feet.

“Then prove it,” I ordered the Hero of the Alabaster Isles. “You say you regret hesitating in the presence of the Gadfly? Then here’s your second chance.”

And with that, ignoring Selene‘s protests and Scythas’ vicious cursing, I threw open the door. On the other side of the threshold, Socrates stood with a scowl on his bearded face. As soon as he saw the state of the room and those of us in it, the scowl darkened.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me, in an unnervingly neutral tone.

I considered the scene. The Scarlet Oracle draped over my shoulder like a sack of flour, her clothing and hair wildly askew. A pair of Heroes that were assuredly not welcome in this part of the mountain. And of course, the fucking room.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” I said at length.

Socrates inhaled deeply.

“Boy-“

Whatever he’d planned to say next, it was cut short by an eagle’s echoing cry. The cries of women followed soon after. Tucked behind the column as we were, the other oracles couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them. However, we could hear them.

“An eagle!”

“How majestic-“

“Filthy bird, out, out, out-!”

Sorea swerved sharply into view, soaring over Socrates’ head and beating his wings hard to kill his momentum. Massive talons wrapped gently around my outstretched arm, and Selene held out her hands beneath his beak while he heaved up a message.

“Only in Rome,” Socrates muttered in disgust, watching my messenger eagle vomit a roll of papyrus into Selene’s cupped hands.

Selene unfurled the message and tilted the sheet so the four of us could read it.

“Oh no,” Scythas breathed.

“What does it say?” Socrates demanded. I read it again, just to be sure. It didn’t take me long - the message was only a single word.

“Behold.”

The oracles hollered as another eagle swept through the courtyard. Socrates snorted, spinning on his heel, and stepped forward as the supporting column in front of us exploded. Griffon surged through the flying shrapnel, thirty pankration hands blazing around him. Socrates raised a disdainful hand, weaving a hundred truths into that simple motion, and -

“This is justice,” my father told me. The bisected corpse of the fallen sun god reached up and laid its incomprehensible palm over my eyes. “Remember its face.”

- Griffon assaulted us all with a memory of something that even he couldn’t fully recall. Instead of the vivid clarity that Socrates had forced upon me with his remembrance of war, this was entirely a question of shock and awe. It was rough, and it was dirty. There was no particular argument being made - only a statement.

The former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn struck us all with the entrancing wonder of the fallen sun god. And in the split second that it took Socrates to shake it, Griffon closed the gap and punched him in the throat.

1.50

The Young Griffon

The ideal of the institutions that we called the greater mystery cults was camaraderie in pursuit of greater understanding. These were learning places, yes, as well as fonts of overwhelming strength in times of strife. But their central purpose was not to uplift, nor to make war.

The mystery cults were a timeless reminder that every man was equally worthless under the sun.

“You’re certain that you can’t tell me anything about it, senior brother?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” my senior within the Raging Heaven Cult affirmed. His pneuma marked him as a cultivator in the eighth rank of the Sophic Realm. Yet even so, I had found him more than halfway up the mountain. A man of his standing would have enjoyed comfortable seniority within the Rosy Dawn Cult, but here in Olympia he was hardly fit for the second-rate estates - only the junior mystikos slept closer to the storm crown than him.

No, that wasn’t true. The ones that slept closest to the storm crown were the boys following me like lost ducks, their guardian, and the ugly philosopher that had dared to put his hands on my brother.

Still, it was a shame. A man of such advanced cultivation, and yet so little renown to show for it. I wondered what he could have accomplished by now, this senior of mine, if he hadn’t wasted his time vying for the approval of men that couldn’t care less about him or his life.

“Surely, there’s something you can tell me,” I pressed him. He frowned, shifting the bundle on his back - dozens of papyrus rolls tied by string, clay tablets wrapped in leather, and the whole lot of it bundled in a fisherman’s net of all things.

“I never made it past Sisyphus,” he said ruefully, raising his hand to shield his eyes against the glare of flashing light above. “Up there in the storm, the words your seniors used to comfort you lose all meaning. The thunder is so loud that you can’t hear yourself think. They urged us to go it alone, of course, but once the seniors were out of sight we all bunched up like sheep.”

“They don’t go with you?” I asked. Kyno had said that every senior mystiko within the Raging Heaven Cult was sent by their elders to guard the new initiates during their trial. The Rosy Dawn’s initiation rites were much the same. Everyone, even the pillars of the Aetos family, descended into the heart of the eastern mountain range together to behold the confounding sight of the fallen sun god.

“They do, but only so far,” he said, tearing his eyes away from the Storm That Never Ceased. He sighed and tousled the sandy curls of his hair. “For a man to prove himself worthy of the Raging Heaven he must bear its weight alone, even if only for a step. That is the final trial, the one that every hopeful initiate must surpass.”

“Only one step?” the little king asked, and I smirked at the disdain in his voice.

Fortunately, my senior was just as amused. “Only one,” he confirmed, chuckling. “And I’ve seen boys your age with twice your refinement fail, sulking all the way down the mountain because they couldn’t manage it.”

“Cultivation alone isn’t enough,” the little king declared, puffing out his chest and pounding it with his first. “Pyr and I will make it at least as far as Griffon. Farther, even!”

The little sentinel viciously smacked his younger brother over the head, at about the same time that the boy himself realized what he’d just said.

“You’ve already…” My senior looked sideways at me, his brow furrowed.

“I’ve already decided that I’ll reach the top,” I said, and understanding gentled his expression. That, and a nostalgic sort of mirth.

“Second rank of the Sophic Realm,” he said, fondly and a bit sadly, having gauged my standing just as I had gauged his. “I remember those days. I thought I would be competing in the Games by now, or perhaps pioneering a new field of natural philosophy. The possibilities seem so vast when you’ve only just reached the foot of the mountain.”

“You’re talking like an old man,” I said, knocking him sideways with my elbow. He laughed.

“I am an old man, by the Raging Heaven’s standards. And you’re not far behind me.”

“Is that so?”

“It is so,” he confirmed. “Out in the villages where men like you and I carved our names, captain of the Civic Realm is a rank worthy of respect. No man would hesitate to offer his daughter’s hand in marriage to such a citizen. Reaching captain of the Civic Realm before you’ve even reached legal adulthood? Your father would have to beat the suitors off with a stick.”

“I don’t recall saying that I grew up in a village,” I said, raising an eyebrow. He waved the hand not holding his bundle of texts, gesturing at my tattered cult attire.

“You strut through the premier cult of the free Mediterranean, waving down senior initiates as if it’s only natural that they give you their time and insight, all while wearing the colors of a cult that you can’t possibly be from,” he said. The odd sensation of being pitied and supported at the same time washed over me. “In a way, the trial of the storm crown is much like the experience of stepping into Olympia after a lifetime of shoveling shit on a farm.”

“I think you’re projecting, honored senior.”

“‘Honored senior,’ he says, while sneering in my face.” The older cultivator lashed out with his free hand, a slap to the back of my head that the boys didn’t notice until the clap of flesh against flesh made them jump.

My senior stared curiously at the pankration hand that had intercepted his own just before it struck me. Without the Rosy Fingers of Dawn to render it visible to the naked eye, he instead observed it with his sophic sense. Unlike the aggressive overtures I had often encountered since unlocking my Philosopher’s eye, his influence felt less like a wave and more like the waterfall currents that fed a bath. It coursed over my pankration hand, flowing into the gaps between its fingers and the creases left behind in the skin when those fingers curled and uncurled.

The older philosopher squeezed the hand of my intent, and I squeezed back. He let go.

“I meant no disrespect,” I said honestly. He hummed.

“You may have been right. Perhaps I was projecting. Certainly, my intent was nothing like that when I was a newly minted Philosopher. How long have you been refining that ability?”

“How long has any man been refining the use of his hands?” I asked in turn.

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “I take it next you’ll tell me that you really are from the Rosy Dawn.” I smiled faintly, and he shook his head. “Right, right. That aside, being stronger than I was at your rank doesn’t mean much on this mountain. I said it before, but a captain of the Civic Realm is only impressive in the settlements that can hardly be said to have citizens at all. How old were you when you reached the peak of that realm?”

“Seventeen.”

“Which would put you somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old now, if you were fortunate while bridging the gap and didn’t waste a moment in your studies.”

I said nothing, and thanks to the little sentinel’s quick thinking, neither did the little king.

“A secret, is that it?” We both watched the little sentinel grapple with the little king, one hand planted firmly over his mouth while the other struggled to fend off his brother’s fists and elbows. “What a sad day, when a junior can’t trust his senior with something so basic.”

“Ah, but you already have me at a disadvantage.” I conjured burning hands of pankration intent between the two boys, separating them, and then when they both simply glared at one another I drowned them in a flurry of slaps and light punches. The little king and his sentinel let fly their battle cries, pneuma surging, and began to fight back against the hands of my intent.

“How’s that?” My senior asked, eyes tracking the now visible limbs with keen interest.

“You’ve seen a manifestation of my soul,” I said, conjuring another pankration hand in front of his face, close enough that his eyes crossed as he looked at it. I flexed and waved the fingers of dawn, contorting the limb this way and that so he could observe it. “You’ve also heard my name, though it was given to you secondhand. And I still don’t know yours.”

“Chilon,” he said, his eyes not wavering from the pankration limb even as he offered his free hand to me. When I clasped it with fingers of flesh and blood, he seemed almost disappointed. “I didn’t notice it before, but in the light…” His eyes flickered, tracing the shadows cast by the rosy light of dawn - the faint silhouette of an arm beyond the flaming hand. “There’s more to it that can’t be seen, isn’t there?”

“You have a keen eye, Chilon,” I complimented him.

“And what illuminates it? It’s not quite a flame, but it’s more than simple light.”

“It’s called the Rosy-Fingered Dawn.”

He exhaled heavily. “Of course it is. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting technique. You can control the heat and the intensity of the light?”

“I can.” Behind us, fighting for every step against flurries of pankration hands just bright enough to distract the eye and just hot enough to let them know they’d been burned, the boys were proof enough of that. In contrast, the hand hovering in front of Chilon’s face was burning bright enough to blind a Civic cultivator.

“You were saying about my age?” I prompted him, when he continued to run the streams of his influence and most of his attention over the pankration hand. I dismissed it and he blinked, returning to himself.

“Right. Well, whatever age you are, and whatever backwater town or Island in the Sun you came from, the fact remains that you’re a grown man and only a Philosopher of the second rank. Am I right about that much, at least?”

“You are.”

“Then the circumstances hardly matter,” he said, conviction returning to him as he lectured. “Even the strongest ant in the colony is still an ant. In the world that I grew up in, Sophic Realm by the age of twenty was a feat worth celebrating. Worth telling stories of, as if I had skipped the second realm entirely and jumped straight to the third. But the city-states of the free Mediterranean are a different world entirely, and their standards are tailored to match.

“When I was offered an opportunity at the trials leading to admittance in the Raging Heaven, my family threw a party. And when the leading men of our little town found out about it they scolded my father for not telling them sooner. They declared a festival then and there in my honor, and neighbors and distant relatives that I had grown up doing chores for hoisted me up onto their shoulders, each of them in turn, so they could parade me through the town. As if I was Heracles himself. Children that I had shared lessons with, boys that I had considered my rivals and girls that I had pined over, showered me with praise and begged me to remember them when I was gone.”

Chilon stopped short at the next step, his fishing net full of papyrus and clay tablets thumping to the steps by his feet as he dropped it. He tilted his head fully back, gazing unimpeded at the curtain of furious tribulation that forever darkened the Raging Heaven’s door.

“I hadn’t even been accepted yet,” he whispered, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “I had only been given a chance - but to these people that I had known all my life, I may as well have caught lightning in my hands.”

“But you were accepted,” I observed. He inclined his head in the slightest nod.

“I was. And when I joined the others beneath the Storm That Never Ceases, resolved to go as high as any of my fellow initiates, I realized something. I was the oldest among them by far.”

The little king snarled in effort, one of my pankration hands writhing as the little sentinel gripped it with both hands as well as his teeth. The older of the two boys held it steady while the younger bent back its middle finger with all of his strength. Both boys scowled and drew up their shoulders, weathering the slaps and punches of the rest of my pankration hands. The faint taste of blood appeared in the back of my throat as the middle finger of my pankration hand broke with an ugly crack.

Lefteris’ boys shouted triumphantly, and I rewarded them for their tenacity with another ten hands.

“I was twenty years old, in the first rank of the Sophic realm,” Chilon said. “Of the rest of my peers, only three of them were as weak as I was. None of the three were old enough to grow hair on their chins. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

“Your seniors,” I guessed. He laughed. It was a different sort of hopelessness than the kind I had encountered in our Heroic companions. This was something he had long made his peace with. My ire stirred in the boiling red depths of the Rein-Holder’s marrow.

“My seniors, yes. There were dozens of them there that day. At any given time, it’s natural for half of the Raging Heaven’s senior initiates to be away from the cult, either on elder business or pursuing whatever they pleased. Only the initiation rites can bring them all back. When it comes time to face Raging Heaven, every indigo son comes home to stand beside his new brothers and sisters in solidarity.

“Among all of those cultivators, none of them were below the fifth rank of the Sophic realm - the turning point where a man is closer to a legend than he is a mortal. Captains of the Sophic realm abounded, some of them too young to be married. Even Heroes took time from their epics to support us.

“I saw a Hero that was younger than me that day,” Chilon said, disheartened and awed at the same time. “He was making his rounds through the crowd, like many of the seniors were, but where the seniors were encouraging us, he was encouraging the seniors. Preparing them for another trip up the mountain. Another bout against tribulation.

“It’s different, you know.” Chilon glanced sidelong at me. “Nothing can truly prepare you for the Storm That Never Ceases, not even someone that has lived it before. But when a Hero says the words… Even in the middle of the crashing thunder, when sound has lost all its meaning, those words remain. A senior Philosopher may have seen the lightning with his own eyes, but a Hero has felt its touch. And he’s survived for the Muses to sing of it.”

I flexed the fingers of my right hand, the one of flesh and blood. At any given moment, I could feel the lightning heat of the tribulation hound’s skull. It was as vivid a sensation now as it had been then.

“I believe you,” I said simply, and he turned his eyes back to the storm.

“I wasn’t the only one watching him, of course - my peers were just as enthralled as I was by the sight of so many extraordinary men and women. But he did take notice of me eventually. He looked me up and down with eyes that burned with the flames of his triumphant spirit. Up until that point, he’d spoken to the seniors with an older brother's fondness, despite the fact that he was younger than many of them. He’d graced my peers with words of quiet strength and a father’s stern expectation when it looked like the youngest of them would faint on their feet.”

Chilon rubbed a thumb at his right eye. Unshed tears shimmered in the light of the storm.

“And then he saw me, a twenty year old man standing at the lowest step in the lowest realm that the Raging Heaven would accept.” His voice was thick. “And it was like he was looking at garbage.”

My teeth ground together.

“To answer your first question,” he finally said, after long moments where the only sound was the muted boom of the storm crown and the boys fighting behind us, “I can’t tell you a single thing about the true mystery of the Raging Heaven Cult, because I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I was the sort of man that could reach it.

“The trial of Raging Heaven doesn’t truly begin until you’re inside the storm already. The seniors escort the new blood into the storm, nearly a third of the way to the peak, and the Heroic cultivators among them venture up into the heart of the storm to divert the worst of it. Otherwise, there’d be no new blood to fill the junior estates.”

“And then they set you loose,” I said, leaning against the natural walls of the mountain and relishing the gentle heat of the amethyst veins on my back.

“With a slap on the back and a hearty shove, yes. One step away from the crowd is enough to gain admittance, but I’ll warn you as my seniors warned me - any initiate of the Raging Heaven that does not at least make it out of sight of his seniors will soon wish they had never come to the city of Olympia at all.”

I thought back to the admittedly frenzied hours I had spent in the Storm That Never Ceased. At that time, whenever I stepped away from a statue, three strides had been enough to put it out of my sight.

“That isn’t much better,” I mused.

“No, at best it’s a difference of five steps,” he agreed, sitting down heavily on the stone stairs and fiddling with the knots holding his fishing net together. “But that fifth step is the difference between heaven and earth. Whether you’re five steps away from the group or all the way up at the peak of the mountain, the isolation is the same. In that moment, you experience something that no other cult can provide you. Something that every cultivator beneath the realm of Heroes would kill to know.”

I recalled the lightning. I recalled the storm.

“In that moment,” Chilon said, “you understand the price of ascension. Standing alone against the wrath of heaven itself, you finally realize what it means to defy the rules of nature. The trial of Raging Heaven is a warning and an invitation. The first kyrios, the one that built this institution, speaking to you from the furthest depths of Tartarus - ‘This is what it takes to be a man worth telling stories of. This is the least of what a hero must endure.’

“When my people found out I was a candidate for entry to this cult, they told stories of me as if they were worth hearing,” he whispered harshly, the contents of his fishing net spilling out as he undid the primary knot. Scrolls of papyrus went rolling down the steps, clay tablets slipped out of their leather casings and plummeted to the unforgiving stone.

Little Leo and Pyr collapsed as my pankration hands abruptly lurched away from them, leaning shoulder-to-shoulder and exchanging victorious grins while they struggled to breathe. I caught each of the falling tablets before they could shatter, scooped up all of the papyrus scrolls before they could tumble fully down the mountain. And I watched silently as my senior ignored what he had almost lost, sifting through the remaining contents in his lap.

“Until the day they died, my parents sent me messages whenever they could, asking me for stories of my time in the Raging Heaven. Each year, on the day that I had first received the news of my candidacy, they celebrated like it was a religious holiday. And every year that passed, they became more and more convinced that I had already surpassed the realm of Philosophers, that I was the Hero I had bragged I would soon be when I left. They begged me for tales of my exploits so that they could spread them to all of their neighbors.”

He finally found what he had been looking for, a leather pouch that was filled to bursting with papyrus sheets. As he drew them out, one by one, it was clear that the most recent of them had been sent before I was born. The ink had faded nearly to transparency and the sheets were browned by age.

“I never replied. Not to a single one,” he said, and finally looked up at me. Whatever he saw in my face, it only made him laugh. “My apologies, Griffon. This is why I never offer my juniors guidance. I’m hardly fit for it.”

“The rest of these,” I said, the words carefully measured. My pankration hands brandished in the air what he had let fall. “Are these messages from home as well?”

“No,” he said, watching them fondly as they drifted around him. “These are stories I’ve collected during my time here. Stories worth telling.”

“Where were you taking them?” I asked.

“Everywhere. Most men have a relic that’s close to their heart. An ancestor’s gift, or perhaps a lover’s token of favor.”

I raised an unconscious hand, rolling between my finger and thumb the scarlet gem that hung from my ancestor’s necklace. The one I had stolen from the filial pools in my father’s courtyard, five months and a lifetime ago. Chilon nodded.

“Every cultivator needs something to comfort them when they stand alone against the Fates. Admittedly, I could have chosen something more sensible, but I am who I am. This net and all its contents are my precious relic. Each of those scrolls and tablets is a story that I’ve been told during my time in Olympia, a tale of a Heroic soul that even tribulation lightning could not strike down.”

“You carry all of them with you, and your family's letters,” I said pointedly.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Chilon, an old man with the face and the body of a twenty-five year old, smiled boyishly up at me, shedding all of his years in an instant.

“Because when that hero condemned me with his eyes, I promised myself that I wouldn't utter another boasting word until I had surpassed him. I ignored every letter my family sent me, every request for information - even when they only wanted to know that I was alive. That I was whole, and happy. I was too ashamed to read any of them more than once, let alone reply.

“And when they passed and my siblings gave up on reaching me, gave up on believing that I had passed the initiation rites at all, I realized what a fool I had been. I realized that chasing after that Hero's shadow for so many years had never given me a moment’s joy. I realized that the happiest I’d ever been was riding on my fathers shoulders while he paraded me around the town, holding my mother close when the joy made her legs give out.”

“So you gave up on becoming a hero?” The little sentinel asked. The boys had regained their breath and clambered up my back, peering over my shoulders once again.

“Not at all,” I said. The ire in my soul settled back down to rest. “He only shifted his focus.” Chilon snapped his fingers, pointing at me.

“You’ve got a keen eye, too,” he said, and I snorted. It only made his grin grow. “Here and in the other great cities, a sixty year old man in the eighth stage of the Sophic realm is hardly worth acknowledging in the agora, let alone listening to. It’s been nearly a decade since I advanced from seventh to eighth. My prospects are terribly bleak.”

Against my best efforts, my lips began to curl. “But even so.”

“But even so,” he agreed. “I will take those last three steps into glory. Even if it takes me the rest of my natural life, the rest of every man’s natural life - even if the stars go out and the sun falls from the sky, I will become a man worth telling stories of.”

“And then what?” The little king asked. His mismatched eyes watched the senior Philosopher intently. “What will you do then? Become a Tyrant?”

“No.” Chilon shook his head, carefully slipping the stack of letters back into their leather pouch. “Then, I’ll respond to each and every letter my parents sent me, because I’ll finally have a story for them to tell.”

“But they’re-” This time, it was my own flesh and blood hand that covered the little king’s mouth.

I bowed my head to the old man.

“Thank you for your story, senior sophist. I look forward to hearing the rest of it some day.”

Chilon smiled warmly. I deposited all of the stories that had nearly gotten away back into his net, and he cinched it shut with practiced motions. But when he rose to his feet and heaved it over his shoulder, there was still one more scroll at his feet. I picked it up with a pankration hand, offering it to him.

His eyes swept over the picture that had been brushed with ink across the outside of the papyrus. An ink painting of four young men, standing side-by-side under a mottled brown ring.

The thumb of my pankration hand brushed against the ring, a piece of it crumbling away, and I realized that it was old blood. When this scroll was first written, those four young men had stood beneath a scarlet sun.

“Keep it,” Chilon said. “A gift for my junior, come all the way from the Rosy Dawn. It’s worth reading, I can promise you that.”

Rather than thank him again, I offered him my arm. He reached out, clasping my forearm while I clasped his.

“I made it to the statue of Sisyphus and no further,” he said, looking down pointedly at his own arm. There, I saw a faint scar just above where my hand was clasped. An odd sight for a cultivator of his standing. “When you go, as proof of your progress, try to find the statues of those that fell before us. Each of them carries a blade. When you can’t progress any further, push on until you find one more statue. Leave your blood on its blade, and all of the Raging Heaven will know how far you went against the Storm That Never Ceases.”

“How will they know which blade left the mark?” I asked, turning his forearm so I could get a better look at the scar. Of all the blades I had taken from that mountain - lurking now in my shadow - I could only think of a few that would leave a mark at all noticeably different from this one.

“These statues are memorials to the stories we were raised on.” What had at first been an unassumingly handsome face, when I marked him as an easy target, was now made just the slightest bit wild by his passion. “These are the stars in the sky that we looked up at as children, that our parents promised us we could grasp in our hands if only we gave it everything we had. These men and women, these giants and monsters and holy seers, they’re the curtain of heaven above. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, every son of Helen sees the same thing when he looks up at the cosmic glory.”

As he spoke the words, his influence impressed them upon my soul. The world as I knew it fell away, and in its place -

“There he is, Chilon,” my mother whispered while I lay in her lap. Her hand pointed up, at the vast expanse of light. “There’s Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up the hill. There’s the tyrant that cheated death.”

- I saw the constellation carved into his arm. It was a scar left on his soul as much as his body. Something that I couldn’t have faked if I tried.

“Good to know,” I said, and meant it twice. “But unless the cult’s mystery has a blade of its own, I don’t intend to come down with any scars.”

His pneuma rippled around him. Not an advancement, not quite - but the promise of one on the horizon.

“To the peak?” He asked, though he already knew.

“To the peak.”

The ideal of the greater mystery cults was brotherhood beneath the storm. The acknowledgement that no matter how old you were, no matter where you stood among heaven and earth, some mysteries simply couldn’t be solved. Every man was equally unlikely to reach that impossible understanding. Any man could stand humble by your side in contemplation of the unknown.

We let go at the same time. Chilon turned back up the mountain, continuing the climb to his quarters. Or perhaps beyond. I slipped the scroll he’d gifted me with its four painted men and its bloodstained sun into the makeshift satchel around my waist, the one that I’d made out of an old woman’s golden shawl. The scroll settled beside the cypress mask of tribulation that I’d taken from Melpomene.

“You ought to advise your juniors more often, Chilon,” I called over my shoulder, turning down the mountain while the boys waved goodbye. The sixty year old Philosopher turned his head, shifting the net that he used to catch stories so he could look back at me.

“Why?” he called.

Why? Worthless old man, that should have been obvious.

“Because you’re good at it.”

1.49

The Son of Rome

Solus. The wind carried my name to me, a whisper with no visible source. I grunted and stood up, shrugging the weight of command off my shoulders.

“Ninety-three?” Selene asked, disappointed. She was perched on her scarlet tripod, legs kicking beneath her while she kept count of my repetitions. “I was sure you’d break a hundred today.” One hundred repetitions of any given exercise was the mark Socrates had set for me and my physical training. Once I could do a hundred I increased the weight of gravitas until I could barely do one, and then I worked my way back up.

“The spirit is willing, but the body is weak,” I lied, standing tall and stretching. When I winced it was only partly an act. I could have pushed through and reached a hundred today, but I would have suffered for every last repetition.

As an excuse it would do. I glanced meaningfully at the Scarlet Oracle as I stretched. Her head tilted, golden hair spilling over one shoulder.

“Would the barbarian like a massage?” As always, the old crone of the Broken Tide read my intentions before anyone else in the courtyard. The ancient woman leered at me with her blind, trisected eyes. “How conceited, to think your ugly, rugged body worthy of an Oracle’s holy hands.”

“Oh!” Selene’s back straightened suddenly, the girl drawing her golden veil back down over her face. “I see. Well, I suppose…”

“You don’t have to force yourself, dear. These things are difficult for a girl your age,” came the sympathetic sounds of a woman with nothing but bad intentions. I stared flatly at the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles, a woman named Chara with lips painted white-gold, with a line of the same color running from the tip of her tongue to the back of her throat. She smiled, her right leg curled up against her chest with her cheek resting on her knee. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. Come and let this one ease your aching body.”

Slim hands wrapped around my bicep, and before I could respond Selene had already pulled me halfway to the Scarlet Oracle’s private quarters with the overwhelming strength of a Heroic cultivator.  Melodious laughter and ugly cackling followed us all the way into the room, ceasing only when Selene slammed the door shut behind us.

Each of the oracles enjoyed the privilege of a personal living space, tucked away behind the walls of the late kyrios’ octagonal courtyard within Kaukoso Mons.

Before the Tyrant’s death these quarters had been reserved for sleeping and bathing only. The kyrios wasn’t cruel enough to require the holy women to do their bathing and sleeping in his presence, but he also wasn’t kind enough to give them private leisure. If an oracle was not asleep, in a bath, or in her public temple where mystikos and made men could seek her wisdom, the kyrios had decided she would be in his courtyard. Waiting on one of the tripods he had chiseled himself - in case he ever had a need for her.

Though there was no one left to enforce it after the kyrios’ death, some of the oracles still maintained the habit. For them - the oracles from the City of Squalls, the Alabaster Isles, and the Coast - I assumed it was the inertia of long practice as much as it was a desire for company. The other holy women mostly kept to themselves in their private quarters.

Whether that was because of my continued presence, I couldn’t say. It hardly mattered. Unlike Griffon, I hadn’t come to Olympia in search of an Oracle’s wisdom.

Selene pressed her back against the door to her personal quarters, the entire piece a broad slab of bone-white wood with dyed carvings of a bisected sun sprawled across it. Her veiled face pointed towards me. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

“How did I do?” she hesitantly asked. I smirked.

“Well enough.”

The Scarlet Oracle slumped in relief, and the torchlights in the room shifted as Scythas stepped out of the open air beside me.

“Were you seen?” I asked him. He shook his head.

“No further than the stairway to heaven.”

“Even by the elders?”

“I swung wide around each of their domains,” he said firmly. “And I waited until the Oracle was lost in her fumes before I moved.”

Thus far, the veil of shifting wind that Scythas had been using to obscure his movements around the mountain had been flawless. Though he wasn’t confident in much, the Hero of the Scything Squall had been adamant that he could avoid detection better than Selene. It was the only reason I had allowed him to leave the kyrios’ estate - if he was to be believed, the only entities on the mountain that he couldn’t slip past with his veil were the tyrants in their domains and the Oracle of his own Howling Wind Cult.

It was for that reason that we never met outside of his Oracle’s working hours, while her senses were addled by the toxic fumes that holy women used to invoke prophecy. It was common knowledge that the oracles could no longer deliver prophecies, but the old practices had their own timeless momentum.

“Good.” I sat down heavily on a cushioned lounge, snapping off the buckles and straps affixing my breastplate to my body with practiced motions. A gift from Socrates, insomuch as he was capable of giving gifts. I’d asked the old philosopher how much it had cost him, where it had come from, but he’d only waved me off and thrown rhetoric in my eyes for my trouble.

It was a good piece of armor. Strong, scraped and worn but undeniably whole. It was carved in the usual fashion, in the image of a man’s bare torso. Moving in it while I trained was comforting in a way that I couldn’t explain.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” I bid Scythas, setting aside the armor and rolling my shoulders, gripping the juncture between my collarbone and my neck when the muscles clenched painfully. I didn’t allow it to show on my face. Not in front of him.

I tensed as slim hands brush mine aside, digging into the knots and snarls of overburdened muscle. I glanced up at Selene. Her veil still covered her face, golden silk with vibrant red threads winding through it like sun rays.

Her hands froze as I looked up at her. Then, slowly, they resumed their kneading.

“Selene,” I said quietly. “The massage was just a cover to get us in here.”

“Certainly.” Her voice was light, gently amused. “But the best lie is a truth repurposed. What will we do if Chara notices you’re still stiff when we leave the room?”

The better question was what I would do if I had to continue living among Greeks like this. I let it be, returning my attention to the first hero I’d met in this city. The first man to suspect Griffon and I of malintent, and now the first man to act as my scout within the cult.

“Things have slowed down since the two of you encountered the Gadfly,” he said, and there was still a bit of wonder there. He hadn’t fully believed it until I’d told him myself, despite tracking me through the rumors spread about Socrates walking me down the mountain. “If the other elders are anything like mine, things would have escalated very quickly if the two of you had kept on the way you were. Especially after you got the others involved.”

He shook his head, leaning against the wall beside me. He still looked exhausted, with dark bags beneath his eyes, but the flecks of color in those hazel flames had brightened from copper to gold again.

“The Raging Heaven is an institution that attracts men from all over the continent,” he said. “There’s always been a large portion of initiates with no ties to any other cult, success stories from nameless settlements or cultivators recovering from disgrace in other institutions. When the kyrios was alive they served directly under his banner, like everyone else. But now they have no master to serve. The elders are focusing on these initiates first.”

“Jason mentioned coercion through lectures.” I noted the way his eyes flickered when I said the name. “They’ve moved fully onto that?”

He nodded. “It’s… The situation has not improved at night, but it’s stopped escalating. I don’t think they intended to be this far out in the open this early on with their Crows, but you left them no choice. Now it’s a question of who will withdraw first.”

“Hardly a question at all.” How could any of them, when the game had only just begun?

“Exactly. But for the moment, it isn’t getting any worse. Instead the senior philosophers are out in force, offering lectures on every topic under the sun. It’s a good time to be a junior in search of knowledge.”

“And if the lecture happens to lead into other topics, how can a man be blamed for following the natural flow of discourse,” I concluded. “What else?”

“Preparations for the Games are underway. The kyrios was already in talks with the city's officials, foreign dignitaries, the other city-states and their cults - but with his passing, negotiations are up in the air. The men of the city offered to shoulder the burden while the Raging Heaven mourns, of course, but the elders couldn’t allow them to carry that alone.”

It was a unique bitterness with which the Howling Wind’s Hero spoke. I remembered the night of the funeral, when Scythas was the only one out of all his peers to defend the elders’ intentions. That hadn’t been so long ago, but the events that followed had tainted that optimism.

Scythas had held onto one hope above all - that no matter the machinations of ravenous tyrants, a greater man’s death was something they could all come together to respect. His elders had not wasted any time correcting him. It was a lesson I’d been forced to learn early on in the legions. It was a lesson every man had to learn, sooner or later.

“And whoever takes the most commanding role in negotiating logistics adds another notch to his belt,” I said, just to have it in the open. “Will the other kyrioi come?”

Scythas hesitated. A vein bulged in his neck, and I knew that there was still a trace of that bleak optimism within him. A remnant that the Raging Heaven had not yet stomped dead. He didn’t want to answer, because he didn’t want to believe the answer.

So instead, I consulted the Oracle. “Selene. Did you attend the last Olympic Games?”

“I did,” she answered, nimble fingers pressing insistently against the point where my jaw met my ear. I tilted my head obligingly, refusing to let slip the relief I felt wherever her fingers went.

“Were the kyrioi there?”

“No. None of them.”

“Why not?” I asked, watching Scythas intently.

Selene hummed, scarlet light flickering behind her veil. “For many city-states, the kyrios of the local mystery cult is their greatest deterrent to would-be invaders.”

“I was told that conflict in the free Mediterranean stopped once the games began.”

“It’s supposed to be that way. It is that way, for the most part. But things have been… tense, recently.”

“Because the kyrios died?”

Selene shook her head, golden hair brushing against my cheek. It smelled of cypress.

“Not quite that recent,” she corrected herself. “This was before I was born. Before you were born, maybe.” The last line was spoken with obvious intent. If we had been alone in the room I probably would have answered the unspoken question about my age. But we weren’t. So I didn’t.

The scarlet oracle softly huffed, continuing on, “The second time that I attended the games, I asked my father that same question about the kyrioi. Spectacular guests are bound to attend no matter what, and the athletes themselves are a joy to behold, but the kyrioi occupy a special place in the heart of our culture. If they could trust their rivals to observe the truce while their best were gathered in Olympia to compete, why couldn’t they come themselves?”

Within the free city-states of Greece, the children of Helen had long agreed that anyone willing to disdain the Olympic pact of peace did not deserve their place among heaven and earth. The threat of unrestrained cooperation between the free cities was something no man had the courage to face - not since Alexander took his armies east.

“What did your father say?” I asked, and Scythas himself tilted his head, the hands of his influence reaching out through the space between us. One of his wind techniques, the kind that allowed him to overhear. He didn’t want to miss a word.

A tyrant’s wisdom was a currency that no man could ever be rich enough in.

“He said that having trust is like being lost at sea,” she said, rubbing her thumbs into the base of my neck. “There’s no end to it, no destination to reach, and if there was then no one on board would know how to get there. All you can do is work your oar and pray the others on board do as well. Because even if they don’t, you still need to get home.”

“Someone has to pull, or thirst will take them all,” I mused.

“One man pulling alone will work himself to death,” Scythas added. “Two won’t fare much better. It has to be everyone.”

“It has to be everyone,” Selene agreed. “He said that if one man sat back while all the rest pulled, it was only natural that he’d be cast off the ship. The same for two, or three. So long as those rowing in good faith maintained the majority.”

“But the majority do still observe the pact,” I said, following the analogy to its natural conclusion. “The free cities have been at peace for over a century now. Haven’t they?”

“I asked the same question,” Selene said sadly. “And my father told me that our trust wasn’t broken by the majority. He told me there were other ways as well. Things one man could do alone to ruin what all the rest had labored for.” Her fingers paused. Drew away.

“He could throw out their oars while they were sleeping,” she whispered. “He could condemn them all to the Fates.”

Scythas slid down the wall until he was sitting with his knees pressed against his chest.

“One man ruined it for all the rest,” he said, defeated. “The kyrioi haven’t attended the games in decades because a lack of war does not always mean an abundance of peace. Since I was old enough to understand all of the conversations that I wasn’t meant to hear, the people of the Hurricane Heights have been living their lives on eggshells. A storm swept through the Mediterranean before we were born and the city-states have only just started to recover from it.”

I nearly asked what he meant, but paranoia stopped me short. Something about the way he said it, the look in his eyes, told me this was something the man he imagined me to be would know. Something I should have known. I kept the question to myself, and resolved to ask Griffon about it when we reunited.

Instead, I said the words I knew would crack him open like an oyster.

“And yet.”

“And yet,” he echoed miserably, “these Games are different now. The kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult is dead, and the elders have already decided to hold these Games in his memory. It was acceptable that none of the kyrioi left their cults and their cities to attend his funeral, held so soon after his death. But they still have months to prepare for the Games.”

“Skipping the Games means insulting his memory,” I said, the strands connecting one by one. The more that I learned about him, the more absurd the late kyrios became. The an insult to his memory could carry such weight. “But there’s more to it than that.”

Scythas clenched his eyes shut, and I mercilessly struck down on what was left of his bleak optimism.

“There’s more to it,” I said again, layering Gravitas into the words and forcing them through the curtain of wind he’d subconsciously summoned up around his ears. “Because there’s nothing to say that the next kyrios of the Raging Heaven has to be a citizen of Olympia.”

“Yes,” he whispered, finally. Accepting what had been in front of him all this time. “The tyrants on this mountain are readying Olympia for the games, but they’re also readying themselves for a power struggle. Once the kyrioi come… I don’t know. But they’ll be here, all of them. They can’t afford the alternative.”

I burned his expression into my memory. I wouldn’t coddle him for it. Wouldn’t acknowledge it, not now. But I’d never forget it either. I had sent him out to find information where I could not, knowing the state he was in. And now here he was. Here was the fruit of the captain’s labor.

“You’ve done well, Scythas,” I said quietly. The least I could give him now was the truth. And it was all that I’d give him.

Now then.

I reached out to the empty space in Selene’s quarters, the space that Scythas’ eyes had flickered to when I spoke a pirate’s name, and clenched my fist.

Every piece of furniture in the room scraped across the floor towards me, clay pots shattering as they fell. Bolts of sunray silks and papyrus sheets covered in drawings scattered through the air.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles stumbled out of the empty air as Scythas’ veil broke apart beneath gravitas. Jason stared down at his now visible hands and then back up at me, wide-eyed.

“I lied, before.” Scythas waved a hand at his fellow Hero, too broken down to be ashamed at being caught in the act. “I was followed.”

1.48

The Young Griffon

“The old man you’re here to punch,” whispered the little king, Leo, “it’s the Gadfly, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“We’ll help you,” the little king decided. “Won’t we, Pyr?” His loyal sentinel nodded.

“I don’t recall asking for your help.”

The boys shared a look behind my back, still clinging to me like monkeys as I ascended through the various estates of the Raging Heaven Cult.

“Where we’re from,” Pyr, the little sentinel, said, “a student has to prove himself before his mentor will take him on. The greater the student, the greater his deed will be.”

“The two of you assisted me in combat against a hero’s virtuous beast,” I said, patting them both on their cloth-covered heads with pankration hands. “I know philosophers that wouldn’t have the guts for such a thing. Was that not enough for you?”

“Of course not,” the little king hissed, indignant. “What sort of king stops short at a beast?”

I found myself smiling.

“You two remind me of my cousins,” I said, amused. I nodded at a trio of young philosophers as they walked past. Their eyes lingered on the Rosy Dawn attire hanging around my waist, on the laurel wreaths wrapped around each of my biceps, and on the pair of mongrel children hanging off my shoulders. I clearly saw their suspicion of me at war with their confidence in the men that guarded the mountain. I did not belong, but I could not possibly be here against the will of the Raging Heaven. They hesitantly nodded back and hurried down the steps.

“You have cousins?” the little sentinel asked.

“How many?” the little king asked eagerly.

“Five.”

“And how many siblings?”

“None that I know of,” I said lightly.

“That you know of?” the little king’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean?”

“It means my father is a worldly man. He traveled the Mediterranean to its furthest limits when he was my age. Who is to say how many seeds he planted along the way?”

“Is he a powerful cultivator?”

“Of course he was,” the little king answered his brother’s question scornfully. “Just look at his son. The proper question is how powerful is he? Griffon?”

“I wonder,” I mused, looking up past the amethyst veins of Kaukoso Mons, past the Storm

That Never Ceases, to the risen sun. “A thought occurs to me.” The boys leaned in attentively.

“You said that the greater a student is, the greater their offering will naturally be to a prospective mentor. I’m assuming in the city of your birth that such transactions are often more materialistic than what you’re suggesting. Riches rather than actions.”

Their silence spoke volumes. I chuckled and flicked them both on their noses.

“I have no issue being paid with virtue over vice. However, the other thing that occurred to me - if a hopeful student’s offering is scaled to their worth, then wouldn’t a prospective mentor’s price be scaled in the same way?”

“That’s true…” Pyr slowly agreed.

“What’s your point?” little Leo demanded.

“You’ve offered to take up arms against the Gadfly with me,” I reiterated, waiting for them both to signal their agreement. “To stand against the Scholar, an act that I’ve personally seen Heroic cultivators cringe away from as if I’d asked them to dive into the Styx. What you’ve offered is more than most men would ever willingly give.”

I tilted my head back, smiling languidly at the upstart vagrants from the city of conquerors. Home to the Scattered Foam Cult.

“What makes you think that is nearly good enough to be my students?”

“What!?” the little king shouted, pounding on my back. “That’s unreasonable! That’s beyond unreasonable, even for a king - and you’re no king!”

“Who told you that?” I asked curiously.

“... you are?” The little sentinel whispered.

“Of course.”

“King of what? King of where?” little Leo pressed me.

“King of the greatest kingdom among heaven and earth. King of the only kingdom that matters.”

“Where?”

“Tell us!”

I tilted my head up. “King of the rising sun.”

Then I threw them both through an open door.

A medical pavilion had no business being opulent, but here we were. The Raging Heaven had decorated its place for the ill and infirm with tapestries of the first physician and exquisitely stitched depictions of the greatest of his works. Alchemical processes and the distillation of medications were stitched into a visual format, recipes that were pleasing to the eye. Carved into each of the supporting pillars that held up the roof was a line from the Hippocratic oath, the same oath that I had taken with Anastasia as my witness in the forests outside of Olympia.

The boys scrambled to their feet amidst the scolding of physicians. A man in a pure white tunic with sashes of indigo and gold wrapped tightly around his forearms and hands stalked over from a nearby bed to berate them. Panicked, the little sentinel placed himself between his brother and the approaching surgeon. The little king grit his teeth and balled his fists.

“Senior!” I greeted him gaily, stepping into the medical pavilion where mystikos of the Raging Heaven came to be made well. The man looked sharply my way as I entered. He was tan, shorter than Scythas with a stockier build; cultivation had rendered him aesthetically rugged rather than runty. As his influence crested against mine, I identified him as a Philosopher of the fifth rank. He was old enough to be my father.

This was a man that had gained entrance to the Raging Heaven through specialized knowledge of medicine alone, rather than through exceptional cultivation. Which meant that he was an utterly unremarkable man in one sense, and a valuable resource in another.

“Who’s your senior?” The irritated physician demanded, picking the little sentinel up by the back of his peplos. His younger brother tensed, and I saw murder in the coiling of his body. “I’ve never seen you in my life, and I’ve especially never seen these two-”

With the hands of my violent intent I struck the physician at a vulnerable juncture in his wrist, catching the little sentinel with pankration hands when the physician’s hand spasmed open, releasing him.

The physician’s pneuma flooded the medical pavilion. In the light of the risen sun, pure white sheets seemed to glow as they fell to the marble floor - patients that could move threw off their covers as a cultivator’s fury roused them from a dead sleep. I saw his peers, men and women of varying rank within the Sophic Realm, prepare themselves for a fight. Some immediately made their way over. Others hastened to finish up their current work, bound by the first physician’s oath.

“Perhaps an introduction to start,” I said, raising my flesh and blood hands in friendly surrender.

“You come into my asclepieia,” the stout physician said furiously, advancing on me while the boys stood their ground at my side. “Disrupt my patients. Strike the hand with which I heal-”

“My name is Griffon,” I said, offering him a hand. He slapped it aside, standing nose-to-nose with me. He had to crane his neck back to do it, of course, but the sentiment was there.

“I don’t know who you think you are, and I don’t care to know either,” he said dangerously, the waves of his pneuma crashing against mine. I weathered it without retaliation, raising an eyebrow. “But around here, juniors do not strike a physician’s hands. You think this entire mountain is yours to torment? It’s not. You would-be soldiers need to remember who it is that makes you whole again after tribulation strikes you down.”

I met his furious eyes, and a broader picture began to form inside my mind. I flooded the healing house with my violent intent, thirty hands of roaring pneuma that flexed and grasped at the open air. The tension grew thick enough that I felt I could open my mouth and take a bite out of it. The healing man in front of me, a physician that had no doubt devoted his life to mending rather than harming, did not falter for even an instant.

So it was like that.

“My apologies,” I said, bowing my head, and with each hand forced the boys to bow theirs as well. “This one is not yet familiar with a physician’s conventions.”

I didn’t raise my head or allow the boys to raise theirs until the physician stepped back, having found the sincerity in my gesture that he was looking for. I smiled brightly, and he scowled. His brow was heavy, as was his jaw. His eyes were dark slits as they regarded me.

“A serene environment is as important as any medicine where the humors are concerned,” he said flatly. “Your brothers and sisters within this cult depend on that serenity to heal. For some of them, it’s the difference between life and death. Do your roughhousing outside.”

“Of course, senior.”

“Otus,” he snapped. “It’s Otus. Now get out of my pavilion.”

“That I can’t do,” I said, and it was then that Otus the physician realized I still hadn’t dismissed the manifestations of my violent intent. Instead, they had found purchase on blankets and hanging veils of silk used for privacy. They ripped and they tore.

“What-!”

“I’m here to visit a patient,” I said mildly. The boys looked up at me, confused. Ah. There she was.

A beautiful woman that could have been five years older than me, or fifty, pulled the sheets up to her neck as two of my pankration hands tore her veil of silk down from around her bed, revealing her to the rest of us.

“There you are,” I said, stepping through the physician. He stumbled back against another patient’s bed, the ill mystiko reaching out to study the stout doctor.

“Who are you?” the woman in the bed demanded. She dragged herself up into a sitting position, moving with her arms. From the waist down she was motionless. “I’ve never seen you before.”

Her pneuma lashed out, but it was crippled. It broke before it reached me, hardly more than a ripple in a still pond. Her body was broken and her cultivation had broken with it.

“How did you know I was here?” Her eyes darted to the myriad physicians present in the healing house. Somehow, none of them stopped me. There was an expectant dread in the asclepieia.  Somehow, even Otus seemed to be waiting for something.

I supposed I might as well deliver it to them.

How had I known she’d be here?

“A raven told me.”

The woman whose name was Harmodius paled. The woman who had once been a Crow before my worthless Roman brother threw her off Kaukoso Mons slumped back down on her bed, chest heaving as she began to panic.

“None of that, now.” Burning pankration hands whirled through the healing house, causing physicians to flinch and stumble as they swept past and settled themselves all across the crippled woman’s body. “I’ve only come to talk, I promise you that.”

“You,” she gasped, chest heaving. “You.”

“I,” I agreed, and flooded her pneuma with my own.

I had wondered, briefly, when my instruction with Anastasia first began, whether the process of healing would be identical to the subsuming of self that the Reign-Holder’s starlight marrow had tried to inflict upon me and Sol. In the end, it hadn’t been the same process at all. It hadn’t even been close.

Where the marrow had burned and forced its way past all natural barriers within us, my pneuma simply flowed. I allowed the currents of her own vital breath to guide me, and slowly, her frenzied gasps slowed to match my own deep, steady inhalation. I tracked my pneuma’s progress through her body, each pankration hand pressed against her skin acting as another eye.

Serenity. Balance between the four biles. No matter which path was taken, the destination was ever the same. Eukrasia. Healthy equilibrium. For now, while I was still a student in this field, it was enough to know that the problem would reside where the biles were in greatest flux.

I found it immediately.

“Your spine is broken,” I said quietly. The boys clambered up onto the bed by her legs, watching the flames dance on my pankration hands without burning the sheets.

“I already know that.” Panic gave way to defeat.

“So you’re a physician as well as a thug?” Otus said, standing just far enough from the bed for it to be clear that he wasn’t involved. Yet there was rage in those words. In the shaking of his clenched fists.

“Not yet,” I admitted. “Anastasia isn’t finished with me yet.”

It was interesting to see how people reacted to a demon’s name. Physicians and patients alike tensed, gasped, averted their eyes and turned away from me. Before this moment I had been a danger sent from an unknown party. But now I was known. The shadow my caustic mentor cast was long.

Otus, for his part, only became angrier.

“This is a safe place,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. I watched his eyes dart across me, across the hands of my intent. Sizing me up, gauging his odds were he to strike. My respect for him rose, just a bit. “This is a safe place, like all of the Raging Heaven is meant to be but is not. Like the city of Olympia is meant to be, but is not. Can your power plays not wait until the woman is healed?”

“No, they can’t,” I said frankly, and Harmodius moaned in quiet despair. “Because I’ve come to speak to a woman on the mend, and instead I’ve found a cripple.”

Otus’ brow furrowed.

“She’s crippled? Where?” the little king asked, concerned. He patted the former crow’s legs and arms, In the gaps where my pankration hands were not covering her.

I smacked him on his head and gave his older brother a look. The little sentinel took it for what it was, yanking his brother back to the edge of the bed and hushing his complaints.

“If I tell you she’s crippled, why would your first impulse be to touch her?” I asked him. “I know Lefteris hasn’t set the best example, but try to use your head.”

“Don’t talk about Theri like that,” the little king said petulantly. I snorted, turning back to my senior in the field of mending.

He was staring hard at me. Trying to unravel something behind my eyes. “You’re Anastasia‘s student?”

“In medicine,” I confirmed. “Otherwise, she’s a friend.” I watched him absorb that, watched the muscles in his cloth-wrapped arms flex as he fought the urge to punch me in my mouth.

And I watched the fight go out of a man that had been defied in his own domain. Defied by a lone junior he had never met, whose cultivation was lesser to his own.

I frowned.

“How many times has this happened?” I asked.

“Has what happened?” he asked. I watched him steadily, until he looked away.

“How many times has this happened since the kyrios died?” I clarified. A nearby physician, a woman with gentle hands and flowers braided in her hair, shivered and turned away.

The head physician shook his head. “Too many times.”

“And how many of the visits lead to immediate discharges of your patients? To permanent discharges?”

All of them, his silence said.

I took that in. Accepted it into myself.

My pneuma rose.

“Physician,” I murmured. He grit his teeth. I waved a hand at Harmodius, the Crow we had crippled. “Why isn’t this woman healed yet? It’s been days.”

“You said it yourself,” he bit out, hating every word. He didn’t question how I’d known about her admittance. He didn’t have to. “Her spine is broken. She’s lost the use of her body below the waist. Such an injury… it goes beyond the balancing of humors. It goes beyond mending that any of us are capable of.”

“And what could mend it?” I asked, tracing my pneuma as it wound through her body, through channels she had forged over the course of a lifetime. By tracing those channels, Anastasia had taught me how to gauge a cultivator’s true age. Like counting the rings on a tree stump.

Harmodius was thirty-seven years old. Lying hopeless and in tears on this bed, she looked younger than me.

Otus scowled ferociously, though this time it was not at me. Not at anyone, for that matter. The stout healer withdrew into his own mind, thinking furiously over my question, and my respect for him rose again. When he spoke, it was with finality.

“For her, taking into account the break and the extremities lost- time, if she had the proper mentor and a mind for philosophy. If reason and spirit advance far enough, the body is bound to follow. The tripartite soul naturally seeks balance.”

I hummed. “Otherwise?”

“Nectar,” he said at once. “That, or ambrosia.”

The food and drink of the faceless divinity. I sighed heavily, leaning back on the bed. “And where do they sell divine sustenance in this city? Is there a stall I can go to?”

“The kyrios had his stores,” Otus said, and if he took any satisfaction from the way I perked up, pleasantly surprised, he didn’t show it. “If he left any behind it would be in his quarters.”

“Fantastic,” I said, favoring him and our grounded Crow with a smile. “I was heading there anyway.”

“You were-” Otus inhaled deeply, held it for a long beat which I did not interrupt, and then exhaled. “There’s one other possibility. Something your master might be able to do.”

“Ho?”

“Surgery,” he said. “It’s dangerous, and in the case of a spinal injury, far from assured. But if it works then it’s just as effective as ambrosia, and nearly as quick.”

“And you can’t do that?” I asked. Otus sighed heavily, crossing wrapped arms.

“You were a fighter before you were a physician,” he declared. I hummed. “You ascended to the Sophic realm through violence, or discourse, or any number of methods. And along the way you became familiar with other types of martial cultivation. True?”

“True,” I confirmed.

“Just as there are a thousand ways to do violence, there are a thousand ways to mend it. You use hands of pneuma to do your dirty work. If I asked you to instead use pneuma feet, here and now, could you do it? Having never done it before?”

I thought about it.

The boys shuffled on the bed beside me. Harmodius pulled her sheet up further, to her nose.

“Well?” Otus demanded.

“I’m thinking.”

He made a disgusted sound and swiped a hand through the air. “No! You couldn’t! What we do is as different from surgery as a foot is from a hand! We balance humors, mend what can be mended without causing further harm. We’ve sworn to never take up the knife without the proper training, as you have, and we have not been trained.”

“Surely the Raging Heaven possesses at least one surgeon,” I reasoned.

“We do,” the nearby physician said, the woman who had ducked her head. Her hands shook faintly as she tipped a cup of spirit wine into a patient’s open mouth, but she didn’t spill a drop. “Most are away from the cult. But there is one.”

“There was one,” Otus corrected the woman, though his voice was far more gentle than it had been with me.

“Was?” I asked.

“Before she was stolen away in the night,” he said. “Now, only her captor knows where Anastasia is. And perhaps her student.”

I smiled, ever so slightly.

“Boys,” I said, rising to my feet. “We’re going.” The little king and his sentinel scrambled off the bed. Behind me, Harmodius gasped and forced the sheet back over her crippled legs, it having been displaced by the boys and my own pankration hands.

But it was too late. I’d already seen the color of her cult attire.

Which king do you serve? I’d asked her the night we threw her off the side of the mountain. She’d refused to answer then, and Sol hadn’t allowed me the time to press her further. Now I knew.

Grass-green silks, the same as Scythas’. The Howling Wind Cult. I added the elder from the City of Squalls to my list of powerful people scorned.

I glanced back and saw that she knew that I knew. She slumped in despair, eyes clenched shut. A woman that had given her life and her identity in the pursuit of power, of renown - and in the end, given the use of her legs. I watched the tears she’d been fighting break through and trail down pale cheeks.

“I’ll mend you,” I decided. Her eyes snapped open. “With nectar or ambrosia, if I can find it. And if not, with the surgeon’s knife. I promise you that.”

I turned and walked out of the healing house, the boys close behind.

1.47

The Son of Rome

“You were right to seek out Aristotle first.”

I watched death lance towards my heart, a spear with a dull wooden tip that was better suited for a stage play than combat. And yet the rules of nature clung to its tip, and I perceived its simple truth through the lense of my Sophic sense.

A man dies from a spear through the heart.

I knew, like I knew that the skies above were blue on a cloudless day, that his spear of dull oak would skewer me as sure as any bronze or iron. That it would kill me where Gaius’ campaigns and howling wolves had failed.

As if I’d allow such a thing.

Dull wood can’t pierce bronze plate, I declared in the voice of my soul, and the rhetoric clinging to the practice weapon dispersed just as Socrates drove it into my chest. The haft cracked in his hands, the head of the spear crumpling against my breastplate.

“The foundation of a man is built over the course of years, and to tear that foundation apart after it’s settled takes twice the effort. Far easier to find a mentor that knows that foundation, who has built upon it before - either in his own lifetime, or through his students.”

Socrates pressed me with his broken spear, parrying the one I had stolen from the temple of the father with infuriating ease. Oracles heckled and cheered all around us, reaching out to shove at my mentor or pull at me when we passed too close to their tripods. I grit my teeth as he wound another rule of nature around his broken spearhead and fractured shaft, mending them both in the blink of an eye.

“Any man can teach fundamentals, assuming he’s familiar with them himself,” the Gadfly continued, without a hitch in his voice. “But you're past that. You’ve established your virtue, your foundations have been set, and now you're faced with a choice.”

Dull wood can pierce bronze plates at times, Socrates declared, and in the span of an instant, faster than the blink of an eye, he assaulted me with the truth of his own experience.

In that brief instant, Socrates’ pneuma, his rhetoric, clashed with mine and showed me a memory.

Broken men in the earth, screaming horses and calls to retreat. Beneath me, a son of Helen, a brother set against me by war. He reached desperately for the short blade on his belt. I raised the shaft of my broken spear and drove it through the crack in his breastplate.

I inhaled sharply and dodged right, watching the practice spear lurch through the space where my heart had just been. I knew that if I had still been standing there, it would have broken through my breastplate just the same as it had in his memory. Exhaling, I twisted at the hips and swung the shaft of my spear as hard as I could at his knees. He hopped over it obligingly, and I tackled him out of the air.

“That’s it!” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles cheered. “Take it to the ground!”

“Between his legs, boy!” heckled the Oracle of the Broken Tide. “It’s a small target, but it’ll make him sing!”

“You're a troubled case,” Socrates continued, as we grappled. “Aristotle left you half-finished and the legions filled in the rest. Why is it, you think, that we call a cultivator’s formative years their foundation? What purpose does it serve to evoke such an image? The barbarians of the world call it by countless other names- what does a Roman call it?”

Foundation establishment. The Greeks used it to describe the refinement of a Citizen, a cultivator in the first realm. Once a cultivator ascended to the realm of Philosophers, no matter how long it took them, their foundations were considered established. In Rome, in the legions, we’d known a similar concept. A point of no return where a man became what it was that he’d be for the rest of his days. The first blow struck.

And then in his actions, Gaius had given us a name for it.

“Crossing the Rubicon,” I said, and the mystery of the Babel shard translated it to another word as it hit the air. A concept Aristotle had taught me in a distant memory. The first philosophy. Metaphysika.

I snarled as Socrates pinned my legs with his own and shoved his palm up under my chin. Leveraging all my strength to the right, I rolled us.

“And why call it that?” he asked. “What does it represent?”

Sea water struck us before I could answer, a wave appearing from nowhere, and as I coughed and spat I heard the crone of the Broken Tide cackle. Socrates growled in annoyance and ripped the sandal off my foot before I could stop him, twisting and heaving it with all his might. Dona’s laughter turned to an indignant shriek, and stone shattered.

“Advance and consign yourself to never-ending ascension,” I coughed out. Exploiting the crone’s distraction for everything I could, I slammed my forehead into Socrates’ nose and wrenched my arm up under his knee, prying it out of its lock. “When Gaius crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the senate, he condemned himself to eternity. An endless expansion of Rome as he saw it.”

I will step down when the enemies of Rome are dead and gone.

Since the birth of the republic, Dictator had stood unchallenged as the highest realm a cultivator could touch. For Gaius, it hadn’t been enough. And so he’d pressed on further and found what lay beyond.

Dictator Perpetuo.

“Then, to establish your foundations is to take the first step towards building something greater, endless in its expanse,” Socrates said, hammering my right side until I was forced to let go and defend it. “Is that fair to say?”

“Yes,” I growled, wedging my forearm under his chin when he tried to bring it down, pressing with everything I had against him.

“And what does the other half of you call it? What does the Greek in you say?”

“Metaphysics,” I answered, straining, but Socrates was too strong. He tossed me off and we rose with our spears in hand again. “The study of abstractions. The contemplation of things that can’t be directly observed.”

“The first principle,” Socrates concluded, and threw his spear at me like it was a toy javelin.

A dozen whispering truths propelled it through the air faster than any spear had a right to move. They clung sharply to its tip, his rhetoric imbuing it with piercing truths. It was too fast for me to dodge, too fast for me to unravel every portion of the rhetoric surrounding it, and far too fast for me to even think of countering them.

What else could I do but meet it head on?

The captain leads from the front.

I lunged forward and met his spear with mine, tip to tip. The wooden spear exploded with a whistling boom, pelting the late kyrios’ courtyard with shards of splintered wood. The Oracles shielded themselves with their myriad mysteries, some clapping and others whistling in appreciation. I scowled and twirled the celestial spear once before slamming its butt against the mosaic floor.

“What you call rhetoric is a blade with more than one edge,” Socrates said, rolling his left shoulder and pacing around the room. I watched him warily, but for the moment it seemed our spar was over. “Tell me, how many forms have you noticed today?”

“Three.”

He rolled his hand at the wrist, urging me on.

“Invoking the rules of nature,” I said, contemplating the eerie bite of a spear that should have had no chance against a sturdy bronze breastplate. “By emphasizing one aspect of your weapon, one strength, you can bypass its weaknesses.” That one had been hammered into me countless times over the last few days, every iteration of the lesson more punishing than the last. “But it can be countered. Inconsistencies can be pointed out to disrupt it.”

“It applies to more than just weapons, boy. But yes. The second?”

I backed up one step too far. Slim hands wound around my neck and through my hair, pulling my back against the warm stone of a holy tripod. Long, thick legs wrapped around my chest, pinning me in place.

“My, my, look what I caught,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles whispered in my ear. “My own barbarian prince.”

“Chara!” Selene cried, outraged.

I tilted my head back, glaring up at the holy woman. “I’m no prince.”

“No, I suppose you’re not,” she mused, her nails dragging down my scalp just gently enough not to break skin. “You’re all that remains, aren’t you? That makes you king.”

“That makes me nothing,” I told her quietly. “It makes me no one.” I leveraged the captain’s virtue against the eerie depths of her influence. She leaned back just a hair, her eyes dancing.

“Focus,” Socrates said, suddenly beside us, and Chara sputtered as he planted an open palm against her face and shoved her off her own holy tripod. He continued on, pacing around the room. I stepped away from the indignant oracle, over to the scarlet side of the octagonal room where Selene was watching me with concern.

“Are you alright, Solus?” she asked once I was close enough.

“Fine.” I set my elbow on the edge of her tripod and leaned most of my weight against it. It had been a long morning.

“Sometime today,” Socrates called. I shook my head.

“The second aspect of rhetoric,” I recalled. “Persuasion through lived experience. Even if a man’s knowledge of a thing tells him something, you can persuade him otherwise with your own recollections.”

The blunt shaft of a spear could not possibly punch through a bronze breastplate like papyrus, I knew that. But Socrates had lived his own life, he had served as I had served - for longer, likely - and he had lived through one of those uncommon circumstances in which such a thing could happen. He had done it himself and he’d shown me the work. That was a powerful thing to argue against, though I could have, if I’d had the time to do so in the middle of our bout.

But I hadn’t had the time. And that had been the point.

“You just realized something,” Socrates observed, though he wasn’t looking at me. “Share it with us.”

“Your rhetoric was flawed,” I said, frowning. “The shaft of your spear was enough to punch through that breastplate only because a stronger weapon had already cracked it sometime prior. You were striking a weak point, not an intact piece like mine.”

“It was a warhorse that did it, actually,” he corrected me idly. “The beast trampled him underfoot - nearly caved his chest in whole. But yes, you raise a fair point. So why did you dodge? Why didn’t you counter me, as you had just before that?”

“I didn’t have time,” I said, searching for the words. “When you were invoking just one truth at a time, telling me rather than showing me, it was like a thrust I could parry. But that… that was an ambush. I had to recognize it before I could counter it. I had to understand what you were trying to convey, find a flaw in your reasoning, all that before I could even attempt to counter it. I didn’t have time.”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Rhetoric is about more than truth alone. Every man’s truth is a slightly different shade, you’ll find that out soon enough. A false argument presented in bad faith can be more powerful than the truth as you know it, so long as it is convincing. Not a righteous approach, but one you’ll have to contend with.”

“Third,” I murmured. “Principle.”

The captain leads from the front.

Socrates ceased his pacing, eyeing me from across the courtyard. The Oracles lounging off to his right and off to his left, belonging to the Howling Wind Cult and the Blind Maiden Cult respectively, each leaned forward with interest.

“Explain.”

“We are men of principle,” I said, reciting the words like a prayer, as Griffon had in the temple of the father. “Each of us holds dear to our hearts an ideal, a state of being that we aspire to every day of our lives. Something that we cannot achieve as citizens alone.”

Socrates crossed his arms, the muscles in his forearms flexing as he considered me. “We call it the first principle because it’s the first valuable thought a man has in his life,” he finally said.

I considered that, considered the words. The ideal. The Roman commander, leading the charge against the screaming hordes.

Yes. That sounded right.

“There’s power in striving towards something greater than yourself,” I continued, sounding out the words as much as speaking them. But they felt right. They thrummed through the channels that the Reign-Holder’s marrow had burnt through me, empowering me. Allowing me to stand up straight, where I had been forced to lean on Selene’s dais moments before. “And there’s power in getting closer.”

“And if you live counter to that ideal?” Socrates challenged me. “If you return to the earth the principle that you cast off your silk bonds of mortality for?”

Every oracle answered as one. A sorrowful epitaph.

“Deviation.”

1.46

The Young Griffon

“Lio! Teach-”

I slapped the little king upside his head. He yelped.

“When did I say you could call me that?”

“Griffon,” he amended, rubbing at the spot where I’d struck him. “Teach us.”

“I refuse.”

“What- You can’t refuse!”

“And why not?”

“Because he’s the king,” his older brother said, doing his best to impart authority through a ten year old’s voice. “When the king makes a demand, it comes from two mouths. The mouth of the man and the mouth of the kingdom.”

I smiled faintly. “Then I refuse him twice.”

The two boys shouted in outrage and leapt on my back, clinging like monkeys while they hammered punches into my side. I locked them in place with pankration hands and reached back, digging knuckles of flesh and blood into their fire-branded hair and rubbing viciously. Their battle cries turned to shrieks of pain in an instant.

I let them go, leaving them to roll on the ground and rub at their heads while I walked through the vast storm-carved gates that separated the Raging Heaven Cult from the city of Olympia. Unlike most metropolitan constructions of this scale, it had no men to guard it. Any unfortunate soul that tried to slip past the cult and through these unmarked gates would have their labor laid out for them. The cult guarded this side of the city, that was universally known, and any that came down the mountain would of course be welcome in Olympia.

The Stairway to Raging Heaven that connected the Half-Step City to Kaukoso Mons was no less bombastic than the rest of the cult. Upon each step a man’s name was carved, inlaid with precious gems that burned even in the pitch dark night. Titles and nicknames were present just the same. Each name was a living soul within the Raging Heaven Cult. Each name was a man or a woman standing at the foot of the mountain, casting defiance up at the stars.

But that wasn’t the most interesting thing about this stairway. What had first drawn my eye, and what still did now as I approached, was how the names changed.

Lambros. Nikitas. Lyko. Three steps, and a name for each, each glowing with a progressively brighter blue light as the steps ascended. But my eyes drifted, and when they drifted back, the names were changed. Mideia, Annita, and Flora.

Every step leading from Olympia to the hallowed grounds of the Raging Heaven Cult was inlaid with a mystiko’s name, and at the same time, the stairs were inlaid with every mystiko’s name.

There were forty-one steps on the stairway to heaven. One for every rank and realm of cultivation. And each step proudly proclaimed the names of every mystiko who shared that rank.

“Wait!” The little king and his sentinel bounded up the steps after me, stepping over the names of the civic cultivators within the Raging Heaven Cult - children of senior initiates, those lucky enough to be born into an institution that otherwise only accepted the best.

“I won’t,” I declared, but manifested pankration arms obligingly when they jumped on my back again. This time they simply hung on and peered over each of my shoulders.

“Theri said we weren’t to leave the house,” spoke the sentinel that called himself Pyr, though his heart wasn’t in it. The boy’s nose scrunched, eyes roving intently over the entry to the grandest institution in the free world. His younger brother didn’t even bother pretending.

“We’ve never been up this way before,” spoke the little king that called himself Leo. He set his chin on my shoulder, peering down at the steps curiously. “Whose names are those? Past members?”

I shook my head, stepping onto the first rank of the Sophic Realm - someone named Vaso. When I raised that foot, the name was changed to Kovos.

“These are existing cultivators, your rivals and friends,” I explained. “The Raging Heaven Cult keeps a living account of their members, along with their standing among heaven and earth.”

“How do you know?” the little king asked.

I stepped up onto the second rank of the Sophic Realm, the name Griffon disappearing beneath my feet, and when I moved on up the name was unchanged. The boys’ eyes drifted over the step without pause. As I had suspected, the stairway to heaven would always show you your place among your peers, but others wouldn’t necessarily see the same thing.

“A hunch.”

“So you don’t know,” the little king concluded. Ho, was that scorn?

I continued up eight more steps and then fell into a crouch on the tenth step of the Sophic Realm, looking down at the next step where mortal man became legends. The boys tensed on my back, and the little sentinel reached across my shoulders to shove his little brother.

“Apologize,” he hissed.

“Why should a king apologize?” I asked, and they both relaxed. I smiled faintly. “I expect an answer.”

I considered the first step of the Heroic Realm while they exchanged hurried whispers. The higher up the stairway you went, the fewer names you would see. That was common sense, given how few managed admittance to the Sophic Realm, let alone those of heroes and tyrants. I swept my hand across the time-weathered stone, watched the name carved into its face inexplicably shift.

Periklis, Wave Dancer, became Amalia, the Breeze. The Breeze became Haris, Wind Weaver.

The Wind Weaver became Elissa, the Sword Song.

“The only time a king should apologize is to his people,” little Leo decided. Pyr nodded in firm agreement.

“Under what circumstances?” I asked, passing my hand over the Sword Song’s name, and revealing Kyno’s in its wake. “Does the citizen have a right to the king’s apology whenever they desire it? How about the metic, or the freedman? What of the slave?”

“Of course not!”

“And why not?” I asked curiously.

“A king doesn’t owe a slave anything, any more than he owes an enemy,” Pyr said at once. “His duty is to his citizens and his soldiers, the men that owe him everything because he’s given it to them. The only time a king apologizes is when he’s failed his kingdom.”

“Are the metics and freedmen included in that kingdom?”

He hesitated. “Here, in Greece, they are.”

“They are,” the little king said firmly.

“So freedom is the deciding factor,” I mused. “A king should apologize only if it’s a free man he’s apologizing to, is that it?”

“That’s part of it,” little Leo agreed.

“And if he does otherwise, he ceases to be a king?”

On that, neither boy hesitated to voice their agreement.

I considered that for a moment, along with the next step on the stairway to heaven.

“Do you know why they built this stairway?” I finally asked. “Can you see its significance?”

“You said it was to keep an account of the initiates,” Pyr said.

“Beyond that.”

They joined me in staring down at the first step of the Heroic Realm as I passed my hand back and forth across it, watching the names shift and glow.

“You have to step on them.”

The little king realized it first.

“Go on,” I encouraged him, but his brother spoke next.

“These are initiates of the cult,” little Pyr said. “These are their names, their pride, and yet…”

I passed my hand over the step one more time, and in its wake, the name Eleftherios, Gold-String Guardian remained.

“Theri,” the little king breathed. His sentinel leaned back, clinging to my shoulder while he looked down the steps and counted under his breath.

“Thirty-one,” he finally said, once he’d reached his guardian’s step. His eyes widened. “These aren’t steps.”

“That’s exactly what they are.” I corrected him. “That’s exactly what cultivation is. A Stairway to Raging Heaven.”

That was why this structure that connected the city of Olympia to the Raging Heaven Cult was only wide enough for a single man to walk it at any given time. That was why the steps were engraved with the names of all those that cultivated virtue beneath the wrathful crown of the Storm That Never Ceased.

“What am I supposed to teach you boys, hm? I’m climbing these steps the same as you. I’m grasping for understanding the same as you are. And I, lowly sophist that I am, am striving to become stronger in the same way that you are. You’re closer to me in rank and standing than I am to your guardian. What can a second rank Philosopher teach you that a Hero cannot?”

“Theri said you’re lying about your rank,” the little king said at once. “He said you’re hiding things, and that’s why he left the other day. That’s why he hasn’t come back yet. He’s looking for answers.”

“That sounds like something you weren’t supposed to tell me,” I noted.

“We’ve already crossed that line,” the older boy said wearily. I patted his head.

“Your guardian says a lot of things, and a few of them are even true,” I said. “But what’s more unbelievable? That my companion and I infiltrated the nexus of the free Mediterranean posing as philosophers and immediately outed ourselves to your guardian and his friends, or that we are simply the best philosophers this world has ever seen?”

“The latter,” the young king said at once. I laughed.

“And yet here we are. You said before that operating on a hunch, a gut feeling, was the same thing as not knowing anything at all. But that’s just it. We are all of us operating on instinct and the greater intuition, more and more the higher we ascend as cultivators.

“Since we forgot the names of those that came before us and their faces were scoured from our holy places, everything beyond the realm of Tyrants has been unknown. The path is unmarked. A Tyrant, then, is a man following his gut to divinity, for lack of all other guidance. That is why we associate them with the hunger.

“I’m sure Lefteris has done his best to teach you the ways of the world, and I would be surprised if a little king and his sentinel had not received the best education money could provide before you ran away from home. But what you fail to understand, what so many fail to grasp, is that cultivation is not a solved system.”

“What do you mean?” asked the little king. Ah, there it was. Finally, the look of someone ready to learn.

“We ascribe reason to Philosophers, spirit to Heroes, and hunger to Tyrants, because centuries ago a man followed his intuition into the darkness of uncertainty and pulled from it a theory. He observed the world around him, and though no one had ever spoken to him before of the tripartite soul, although he had received no mandate from heaven on the subject, he decided that it fit. And so he tested his hunch. And he was right.

“Now, I speak of the tripartite soul and you nod along as if our father in the sky spoke the words through my own mouth. But he didn’t. And he never will. Do you know why?”

Both boys shook their heads, wide-eyed and intent.

“Because cultivation is refinement of the self. And heaven has no need for a man that can’t make it up on his own. The father has no need for a man that’s afraid of the dark. You want me to teach you how to flex your pneuma and strike like a fighter, but those are worthless if you don’t have the proper mindset to develop them further once I’m gone. Before strength, you need perspective.

“A cultivator of the Raging Heaven is someone seeking divinity,” I said, and the words rang true in my beating heart. This cult was soft, rotten from the inside out, but it hadn’t always been that way. Its foundations were still strong - carved from the mountain and embedded with amethyst and gold. “The path to heaven is only one man wide, and all the world is clamoring to reach the top. So how do you make the trip? Do you wait for all of those in front of you to make it there first, follow the path that heaven carved from stone just for you?”

“No,” the little sentinel said quietly.

“You step over top,” said the little king, steel in his mismatched eyes. “On the shoulders of the men who came before you.”

“And when there are no more men in front of you? When all that's left is darkened steps and howling chaos?”

“You keep running. You let your intuition guide you.”

“The king can learn,” I said approvingly. And with that, I bounded up the remaining steps while the boys hung on for dear life, laughing and whooping.

Heroes and Tyrants vanished beneath my feet, and I landed adroitly on the forty-first step - whatever had been carved there once now faded and worn away. I planted my hands on my hips and looked up at the proper path that wound through the raging Heaven cult, the steps widening to the point where a group of eight rowdy drunks could stumble up it after a hard day’s drinking. The storm gates here were a mirror of the ones at the foot of the stairway to heaven, but these were guarded.

I waved pankration hands at the senior philosophers standing guard at the entrance to a cult I was most certainly not welcome in, and after a moment they waved back.

“What’s your name, friend?” one of them called.

“And your business with the Raging Heaven Cult?” the other asked. On my back, I felt the boys shuffle and try to hide themselves. I snorted.

“My name is Griffon, and these are my students,” I replied, smiling brightly as my pneuma coiled and surged within me. Crows could be anyone in the light of day, bereft of their shadowed veils. Even gatekeepers.

The guards exchanged a look and immediately stepped aside, holding their shields to their chests and slamming the butts of their spears against the stone.

“The Raging Heaven welcomes you,” the one on the left declared.

“And pities you,” the other on the right said. I blinked.

“And why is that?”

They exchanged sly smiles.

“The Gadfly is known for many things, some of them even good,” the gatekeeper on the left explained.

“His treatment of his students is not one of those things,” finished the gatekeeper on the right. Rest assured, all of us here envy the insight you’ll surely gain under his guidance.”

“But we wouldn’t trade places with you for all the gold in Egypt.”

Both men chuckled, and I tilted my head.

“So, Socrates has claimed me as his own.”

“It’s an honor few have ever enjoyed. Stand proud,” The gatekeeper on the left said, laying a friendly punch into my shoulder as I passed. I returned the gesture, slapping each of them on the back with hands of formless intent, Lefteris’ boys clinging silently to me.

“Ah, a moment!” the one on the right suddenly said. I glanced back, raising an eyebrow, and the guard waved a hand, as if to say ‘what can you do?’ “We’ll still need to know the purpose of your visit, for the records.”

“Recuperation is the standard response,” his fellow explained. “That or lecture.”

I hummed, considering.

“Neither.”

Their brows furrowed. “Then…?”

I turned back up the mountain.

“I’m here to punch an old man in the throat.”

1.45

The Son of Rome

When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city of Rome to see a marching band.

“There are as many approaches to cultivation as there are stars in the sky,” Socrates spoke, his voice a distant thing.

It was my first clear memory of the great city. I had grown up sheltered even by the standards of a young patrician. My mother rarely let me out of her sight, such was her anxiety, and so I languished in my early years with only the members of our estate and a few family friends as company. For years the vineyard was all I knew - until the day that my father took me from my mother’s arms and brought me to the beating heart of the Republic.

The men of the band were dressed in their legion best, parade regalia of crimson cloth and pristine leather. They wore polished bronze breast plates that glimmered in the sun, the eagles of Rome etched lovingly into their surfaces, and had ceremonial blades strapped to their hips. They marched proud, and they marched strong. In perfect synch, as one existence.

“If there is an objectively correct way to approach the refinement of the self, we have yet to discover it.”

Some of the men carried tympanon, beating the shallow drums with their hands as they marched. Others bore the long, almost circular curves of brass cornu on their shoulders. Centurians set the pace, easily marked by their distinctive silver helmets - gold trimmed and bristling with crimson manes. They marched down the streets of Rome in cadence, and their music was like nothing I had ever heard before.

“Every cult has its own methods, and so do all the major families. There are schools of philosophy run by men who think themselves wise, and schools of war overseen by men who know that some virtues can only be taught at the tip of a blade. There are benefits to almost any method and drawbacks to match.”

I had never seen a city street before that day, let alone a city street in the midst of a parade. Hundreds of people - thousands - lined the stone steps of temples and bathhouses, balconies and rooftops, all of them straining for a clear look at the marching men. I was overwhelmed in more ways than one. The people, the music, the sights and sounds and scents of the city, they were all so much harsher than what I had known within the walls of my family‘s estate.

It was all so vibrant.

My father hefted me up in the crook of his arm so I could see over the crowds. He pointed out elements of the parade that a child’s eyes wouldn’t pick out on their own, describing with quiet pride the hours upon hours of practice that had gone into those simple marching columns. He explained to me the coded commands the centurions were barking out, how those same commands practiced here would serve the legions in coordinating men on the battlefield. Even here, they prepared themselves for war.

“In general, how a man refines the aspects of his virtue is less important than what that virtue is. It’s a common saying that the grandest monuments are built upon the strongest foundations. Virtue is that foundation - it is excellence of the soul, and it requires constant work. That is what cultivation is, stripped of all our proud descriptions. Refinement of the body and soul.”

What struck me the hardest about that day, watching legionnaires march down marble boulevards as if on their way to war, was how they greeted my father. Every boy grows up thinking the world of his father, but few have the privilege of seeing that respect reflected in the eyes of other men. That day, I realized that my father wasn’t the great man I had always known him to be.

No. Watching legionnaires, centurions, and even noble tribunes divert from their perfect formations as they passed to tip their heads in respect to my father, I realized that he was an even greater man than I had thought.

Captain, they called him, though he was not there in uniform. It didn’t matter. In the city of Rome, rank could be forfeited. It could be retired or revoked. But it could never be fully taken from a man once it had been given to him. Though Cincinnatus returned home to toil in his fields after the work of a Dictator was done, there wasn’t a soul in Rome that would dare refer to him with anything less than the full respect he had commanded at his height.

My father was no different. Though he wasn’t a Captain at that time, he had been in the past, and he had earned his place among the men of the legions. They never forgot it, and they never acted otherwise. Because, eventually, they knew he’d be back. They knew he was that kind of man. And in the end, they were proven right.

“Gravitas is your foundational virtue. A Roman virtue.”

“You know all these people?” I asked my father, astonished in the way that only young children could be. He chuckled.

“More than you’d think, but less than I should.”

“But they all know you.”

“Not quite. They know of me.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, confused. But he only smiled and watched the band march.

“You have Rome in your mind’s eye,” Socrates said. “Keep it there, and refine your musing. You know of Rome and your place within it. Now, picture virtue within that. The heart beats inside the chest, the mind dwells inside the skull, and the gut hungers inside the stomach. But what of virtue?

“Where is Gravitas found within Rome?”

The cries of the people and the marching commands of the centurions fell away at once. The clarion calls of the curving horns vanished like they’d never been. The only sounds that remained in the city of Rome were the beating of the drums, and the pounding of marching boots.

“Son,” my father said, the last voice in Rome, “can you see where they’re going?”

Darkness encroached on the edges of memory, at the end of every alley, and the men of the legions walked in quick-step into that void. I reached out, inexplicably terrified for them in a way that I knew I hadn’t been when I was living this memory.

“They’re off to fight our demons.”

“Where?” I asked desperately, though I already knew.

“Here,” he said, and tapped my heart.

I blinked pyre smoke out of my eyes, staring down at my fathers corpse on its bed of broken shields. The men of the Fifth gathered around him in somber silence, drawn despite broken limbs and battered bodies to his side.

I scrubbed the smoke from my stinging eyes, and gazed upon the broken corpse of a wolf in the shape of a man. The men of the Fifth stood bristling around me, the Prime Cohort seething at the sight of the creatures that had brought down Caesar. I raised my boot and hammered it down, shattering the demon skull. The Prime Cohort roared their approval.

I squinted against the spray of blood, wavering points of light in the night sky above, and cast around for a single Roman soul. I didn’t find them, not one - but I found their corpses. The men of the fifth legion had known ours was a losing battle, and yet somehow, inexplicably, here they were. Surrounding me, when they should have fled. Flanking me, when they should have kept their ranks. Broken, beaten, and damned.

“There are as many paths to refinement as there are stars in the sky. What’s important is that you know where you’re going. What matters is that you know why you want to get there.”

It doesn’t matter who avenges the city of Rome, so long as she’s avenged. I had said those words, hadn’t I? I had believed them with all my heart.

“A cultivator can’t advance unless they know what they are advancing towards. You’ve captured Rome in your mind’s eye, and you’ve captured Gravitas. Your beginning, and your middle. Now, envision the end.”

As if I could ever be satisfied with such a conclusion.

I stalked through fields of broken corpses, demons crushed beneath the weight of Gravitas. I ripped and tore beneath crow-darkened skies. And when I finally reached the accursed city of Carthage, I burned it to the ground.

I tore out the Carthaginian captain’s beating heart while it choked on the ash, and I poured salt into the gaping wound. “Salt and ash,” I snarled in a voice more guttural and inhuman than its own, staring into its wicked gold eyes while I devoured its heart. Salt and ash. Salt and ash.

I opened my eyes inside the estate of the Raging Heaven’s late kyrios, and found myself covered in soot and cave minerals. Beside me, Selene continued to meditate with her eyes closed, humming a tuneless song.

Socrates eyed me, sitting across on his own nest of blankets and silk. “Are you familiar with your master’s theory of the elements, boy?”

“Of course,” I said. The words came out hoarse. “Air, water, earth, fire - and aether.”

“And aether,” he echoed, in quiet contemplation. He grunted. “Four terrestrial elements, and four properties that combine to create them.”

“Hot, cold, dry, and wet,” I recited. I ached for a jug of water, but unfortunately it had all been dumped out onto the floor. I frowned, considering the puddles scattered around the room. They had been closer to me before, hadn’t they?

“Aristotle posits that just as every material object on this earth can be reduced to its composite elements, so too can abstract concepts. Principles, passions, and purposes. He theorized that virtues can be expressed in an elemental form because they share the same fundamental properties.”

The great philosopher laid one hand on his knee, leaning forward.

“Do you remember which properties combine to create which elements, boy?”

I swallowed, and tasted the soot of the burning furniture. The tang of the minerals carved off of the cave’s stone walls.

“Hot and wet create air. Wet and cold create water. Cold and dry create earth. Dry and hot -”

I looked down at my hands, covered in soot and mineral dust. Dry and hot. The component parts of my virtue.

Salt and ash.

Socrates sighed and rose to his feet. “I should have guessed. That worthless boy is the same as he’s always been.

“Everything he touches turns to flame.”

1.44

The Young Griffon

“Observe,” I whispered, as I hunted the Huntsman, ”the coward in his natural state.”

Lefteris’ nameless boys crept after me, bolts of forest green cloth wrapped around their heads to hide their distinctive red hair. There was no hiding their eyes, though, wide and intense as they tracked the Heroic Huntsman himself. Their focus was commendable, though their tracking skills left much to be desired.

I smiled as I saw a muscle in the massive hunter’s neck twitch.

“The coward is aware that his way of life is at risk, but he lacks the killer instinct to do anything about it. Instead, he fills his time with menial pursuits, such as hunting lesser existences and devouring them, despite the fact that he can go indefinitely without sustenance.” I continued to narrate for the benefit of my young charges, maintaining a harsh voice that Kyno could undoubtedly hear.

We were out in the wilderness once again, this time north of the sanctuary city of Olympia. Game was plentiful out here, provided one was powerful enough to deal with any virtuous beasts encountered, or fortunate enough to avoid them. At the moment, the Heroic Huntsman was tracking a stag.

“How do you know he’s a coward?” The smaller, more precocious of the two children asked in his own whisper.

“I’ve been observing this particular sea creature for weeks now,” I said, shifting undergrowth silently aside with formless hands of pankration intent. The boys did their best to follow me in step, but the crunch of dead leaves betrayed them. “Notice his stature, larger than any of his peers. Notice his pneuma, firmly within the realm of legends. This is a man capable of changing the world.”

The larger of the two boys edged slightly in front of his brother, placing himself between the younger and our prey when I described the full threat. I smiled faintly and patted his head.

“And so we must ask ourselves,” I continued, “is he happy and content with his life as it stands, or is he too fearful of reprisal to make it so?”

“Maybe he is happy,” the younger of the two proposed. “How do you know he isn’t?”

”A fair question,,” I acknowledged. I started to rise. “Let’s ask him.”

“No!” The older of the two hissed, jumping onto my back and wrenching with everything he had to pull me back down. “You can’t!”

“And why not?” I asked. He did about as much to stop me as a feather down pillow, but I humored him and froze halfway to my feet.

“He’ll tell Theri we were with you,” the younger said urgently, gripping my right arm with both hands and pulling with all his strength. “He can’t know we left the house!”

I considered that. Across the glade, far enough that two boys of such juvenile cultivation would not be able to make out the fine details of a man’s face, I looked and saw Kyno staring back at me from the corner of his eye. And I nodded gravely, sinking back down into a crouch.

“I understand,” I said. “We’ll continue as before.” The young vagabonds slumped to the ground in relief. In the distance, I saw Kyno close his eyes in quiet despair before returning to his hunt.

“If we can’t get the truth from the man himself, how else might we discern it? What are the signs to look for? Rather, what makes a man happy?”

“Power,” the precocious one said immediately. How cute.

“Naturally.”

“Wealth,” put forward the elder. I nodded.

The younger tapped his chin, mismatched eyes narrowing thoughtfully as we progressed through the wilderness. Kyno had found his mark, a great stag with five points on each antler. I watched intently how he moved, the approach he took and why. I noted which way the breeze was blowing, the shadows that he kept to.

This was no beast of virtue that the great hero was hunting. This was only a stag, and so Kyno was going through the motions as much as anything else. He could have done this in moments if he felt a need to flex his pneuma. But that would have defeated the purpose. After all, this was nothing but a way to kill time.

“Women,” the younger brother proposed, and Kyno winced ever so slightly.

Ho?

“Your age can still be counted on two hands,” I said disdainfully, though my gaze didn’t waver from the Heroic Huntsman. How interesting. “What would you do with a woman?”

“I’d make her my concubine,” the younger brother insisted, puffing up in my peripheral vision. “A king needs concubines.”

The older brother lurched towards the younger in alarm, grabbing him around the neck and covering his mouth. Gently, I separated the two of them with pankration hands, tilting the younger boy’s head up when he tried to stare at the ground in abashment.

“And what would you have the concubine do for you, little king?”

The little king hesitated, looking to his brother, but I had a rather firm grip on them both. Finally, he gathered up his courage and answered boldly.

“I would have her pour my drinks and feed me grapes,” he firmly declared.

I very carefully did not laugh. We were hunting, after all.

“What shall I call you, little king?” I asked him. Lefteris hadn’t offered the information the night I came down the mountain, and I hadn’t cared enough to ask. But now I was curious.

The boy answered with a mechanical precision that spoke only to a lie.

“Leo.”

“Impossible,” I said at once.

“What do you mean?” The boy demanded, voice rising precipitously as he began to panic. “That’s my name!” Beside him, suspended in mid air by my pankration hands, his older brother began to thrash and fight.

“It is!” the elder insisted. “I swear it is!”

“My virtuous heart won’t tolerate lies,” I warned them both. “But beyond that, you’ve missed my point. It’s impossible for me to call you that, because that’s my name.”

They both froze, staring at me in bewilderment.

“I thought your name was Griffon,” the elder brother said.

“It is,” I confirmed.

I was treated to the sight of two children experiencing a grand revelation. The little king leaned forward, pressing aside my pankration hands so he could get up close and whisper, as if that would make the difference in being overheard, “Yours is fake too?”

“The opposite.” I turned to fully face him, settling down to the balls of my feet. My ragged cult attire pooled on the forest floor like blood, my late uncle’s sheathed sword jutting up as it brushed against the dirt. “Both of my names are wholly my own. I’ve simply chosen to discard one for the other.”

“But it’s still fake,” the younger insisted. There was an old pain there, an insecurity that ached when prodded. “Even if you chose it, you’re only choosing it because you can’t use the real one.”

“Is that what your guardian did?” I asked, not unkindly. The little king shut his mouth, falling silent. I allowed his brother to fight his way free of my pankration hands, looming protectively over the young king's shoulder. I addressed him next, “And what shall I call you, little sentinel?”

“Pyr.”

The lion and the flame. “Tell me something. How long have the two of you labored under false names?” I asked. Above us, nestled in the prickling leaves of the firs that abounded north of the Half-Step City, an eagle let fly a warning cry.

I turned abruptly, thirty hands of pankration intent manifesting with the Rosy Light of Dawn blazing in their palms.

A crocodile large enough to coat a man like a mantle lunged out of the undergrowth, and in its yawning maw an utterly unnatural number of wicked teeth glistened. It crossed the distance between us in the time it took me to turn, before the boys even had time to scream. Then thirty hands of my violent intent slammed down, driving its hundreds of teeth together.

If the beast’s presence here in the winter woods wasn’t proof enough of its unnatural origins, the teeth certainly were. This was a virtuous beast, sure as the sun rose, and it had the strength and speed to match a hundred of its mundane brethren. Unfortunately for the majestic creature, a crocodile was still a crocodile. Once the maw was closed, it was all too easy to keep it shut.

And I wasn’t afraid to wrestle a lizard.

“Observe,” I said, and tackled the crocodile bodily back into the brush.

“We’ve established what makes a happy man!” I exclaimed, wrenching an arm around the reptile’s tree trunk neck and heaving back, thirty pankration hands making certain that it couldn’t open its jaws. The beast rolled, eerily silent for the frenzied nature of its movement. I locked both legs around its midsection, and with my free hand coated in the Light of Dawn began hammering punches into its side.

“Power!” Slam

“Wealth!” Slam

“Concubines, to feed us grapes!” Crack. The massive creature whipped itself and me both almost in a full circle as I finally broke one of its ribs. It exhaled a deep, rumbling noise of pain that made the leaves shiver on their branches. I punched it again in the same spot, and it rolled us right through a mighty fir’s trunk.

“But you forgot pride!” I latched on to the crocodiles straining maw with both flesh hands, withdrawing my pankration arms and turning them upon the falling fir instead. The tree instantly caught flame where the hands of my intent touched, and they set to tearing it apart as it fell.

“Even a coward has his pride, misguided as it may be,” I explained for the benefit of the little king and his faithful sentinel. I saw a flash of wide mismatched eyes and the older pulling the younger insistently back before the fat lizard rolled us again. “Even a coward has his ego!”

The hands of my pankration intent lashed down with sticks and clubs of burning fir wood, hammering into the crocodile from every angle. With a snarl of effort and a twist of my hips, I flipped us once more. My back to the ground and the crocodile’s belly to the sky. My violent intent struck its vulnerable underside without mercy, and I relished in its rumbling cries.

And then I was pleasantly surprised. I heard a child’s sharp cry, felt a lowly Civic cultivator rush into the eddies of my influence, and the little king came lunging through the undergrowth, wild-eyed and with a wood-cutter’s axe in both hands. He leapt through the seething mass of my flaming pankration hands and leveraged every ounce of his strength to bring his axe down on the crocodile’s exposed stomach.

The cutter’s axe shattered. Of course, even the frailest of such a creature’s scales were more than a match for an axe of humble iron.

The little king bared his teeth and balled his fists, hammering punches into the beast’s stomach instead. I grinned. A moment later, the sentinel burst through the brush, pneuma flaring in absolute panic, and did not hesitate upon seeing the situation. The elder threw himself bodily on the crocodile’s snapping maw and drove both thumbs into its eyes.

The beast’s pneuma rippled and burst. The certainty of death enveloped all three of us in that moment. The knowledge that we had already been hunted, that we were already sitting in the predator’s mouth. I felt the crocodile bite down on my very soul.

I threw my head back and laughed.

“Good! Good! Fight like you mean it! Fight like this is real, because it is! A man dies a thousand deaths if he lets a thousand insults go - power, wealth, and women can be gained and lost and gained again. A man’s pride is the only resource he can’t win back! Guard it with your life, because it is your life! Wealth is transient, power is relative -”

The Heroic Huntsman hurtled down from the heights of the fir tree forest, cratering the ground and throwing all of us three feet into the air. The boys grunted, landing sloppily, and stared petrified at the stone-faced hero.

I craned my head to meet Kyno’s eyes and smiled brightly, laying one last fist into his crocodile’s wounded side.

“Pride,” I promised him, “is absolute.”

Kyno‘s lip lifted from his teeth. The hulking cultivator gestured sharply with his right hand, the left currently holding a ten point stag by the scruff of its neck like an unruly dog. I let go of the crocodile and watched with some amusement as it rushed to him, surging up his legs and somehow turning from a living, breathing predator back to an empty skin the instant it came to rest over his head.

“You’re too loud,” the Heroic Huntsman rumbled. “You’re scaring all the game.”

“What makes a man happy, Kyno?” I prompted him, propping my head up on one hand in lieu of standing.

He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“He was right,” the little king whispered to his sentinel.

“My mentor always told me that his greatest happiness in his life was teaching me,” I said meaningfully. It was true. Old Chersis, the man who had shouldered the primary burden of my formal education within the Rosy Dawn, had said those very words countless times. Whether or not his tone had been entirely genuine when he said them, I couldn’t say.

“I highly doubt that,” Kyno said, likely thinking of my surly Roman brother.

“It’s worth trying,” I said encouragingly, and came to my feet, brushing off my ragged cult attire. I could already feel several deep bruises forming where the crocodile had rolled me into particularly unforgiving surfaces, but it was a pleasant sort of pain. “I’ll admit, my grasp of field craft isn’t what it could be. And I’m sure these boys would love to learn from a legendary hero. Isn’t that right?”

The little king nodded firmly, leaving his sentinel no choice but to follow suit.

Kyno considered the two of them. Dark eyes swiveled to me, and the crocodile’s ancient predation shone in their depths. I stepped forward, into the open maw, and offered my hand.

You’ve lost some pride, I spoke in the voice of my soul, so the Civic boys wouldn’t hear. Are you going to watch the rest slip away from you too?

For reasons that I didn’t know, but intended to find out, the heroes of this place had been broken down. Rendered less than what they should be. But that did not mean they had lost all of what they were. They were still men and women worth telling stories of. They were still beloved by the Muses, and reviled by the Fates.

And this one, looming over me in a winter glade with blood dripping from his hands, was still a fearsome predator.

“Teach me how to hunt,” I bade the Heroic Huntsman.

He huffed a breath and clasped my hand in his.

1.43

The Son of Rome

As a young patrician of Rome, and later an attendant to the general of the west, I had grown used to being in the presence of powerful people. Those with physical power, those with political power, up and down the spectrum of influence within the Republic.

“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” Selene counted off dutifully while I pressed against the gold and ivory mosaic floors of the late kyrios’ courtyard. ”Forty!”

I let go of Gravitas and collapsed, forehead pressed against the cool stone as I panted for breath. After thoroughly proving his point with regards to my foundational imbalance, Socrates had advised me to continue my calisthenics under the influence of the captain's virtue. I invoked Gravitas just enough to make the work nearly unbearable, but not enough to keep me fully down, and I returned to the basics until my body gave out.

It was grueling, but I couldn’t deny the results. I felt like I was a boy again, training my body under Aristotle‘s watchful eye for the very first time. Basic calisthenics that had ceased to yield any real benefit long ago felt challenging again. With every push-up, every lunge and crunch, I cursed myself for not doing this as soon as I had first tapped into Gaius’ virtue. At the same time, a more realistic part of me acknowledged that I’d held it in such high regard for so long that I never would have considered such an option if it hadn’t been forced on me first.

Still, the benefits of Socrates' training were one thing. But there was something unnerving about keeping this sort of company, even with all my experience.

The Oracles of the Coast, the Alabaster Isles, and the City of Squalls - also known as the Hurricane Heights - politely applauded while the Scarlet Oracle hopped off my back and went to grab a jug of water.

“My, you’re in fine form today,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles said, resting her cheek in one hand, the other holding her knee up to her chest while she lounged on her holy tripod. Her smile was teasing.

“I’d expect nothing less from the last son of Rome,” spoke the Oracle of the Hurricane Heights. She was a lithe woman, a slim contrast to the Alabaster Oracle’s obscene curves, and her hair drifted in a breeze that couldn’t be felt. Threads the color of harvested wheat drifted around her hallowed tripod, spiraling through her fingers as she idly weaved. “Tomorrow he may even reach fifty.”

“Respectfully,” I groaned, forcing an arm beneath me, “I didn’t ask the oracles for their input.”

“Respectfully, he says,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide cackled. Of the five, she was the only one that fit my mental image of what a soothsayer should be. Ancient, wrinkled, and frail. Her shawls and sashes seemed to swallow her up so that all a man could see of her were her skeletal hands, and the wispy strands of bone white hair that flared out from under her hood. Her face was thin and severe, perpetually leering.Her eyes were milk white and the pupils were trisected.

She was also, bizarrely, sitting in the lap of the Brazen Aegis’ Oracle. As it had been explained to me the first time I had met them, the Scarlet City had only one oracle despite being home to two separate cults because their mysteries were intimately related. The coast, on the other hand, had two entirely separate mysteries which their cults were built around, and so the city had enjoyed the privilege of two separate oracles.

The late kyrios had taken this into consideration and declared that eight tripods for eight cities was perfectly fair, and so they’d been forced to share ever since. Sitting together like as they were, they looked nearly like a mother and her daughter.

“Men have given their lives pursuing a moment of our time, you know,” the crone of the Broken Tide said, smacking her fellow Oracle’s hand away when it tried to cover her mouth. “The richest man in the world wouldn’t be able to buy the company of two of us at any given time, let alone the five you have before you.”

“If I wanted to pay for a woman’s company, I’d go to a brothel.” I managed to sit up and accept the jug of water Selene offered me, nodding gratefully, and drank deeply. The Oracle of the Broken Tide laughed so hard that she started to choke.

“Forgive them,” Selene whispered, her shoulder bumping against mine. “It’s rare for us to meet someone we can speak freely to.”

“There are certain things a seer can provide that a prostitute can’t,” the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles pointed out. Her eyes danced, silk chiton shifting as she laid her chin on her raised knee. Her lips were painted in the shades of the Alabaster Isles, a spectrum of white-gold to canary yellow.

“Perhaps he has no use for a soothsayer,” the Oracle of the Hurricane Heights mused, weaving her hovering thread. She blew her waving hair absently out of her face. “Is that it after all, son of Rome? Have you no interest in what’s to come?”

I drained the last of the water from the jug. Gravitas struck me like a clenched fist, pressed me down, and I got to work on my situps.

“Seems you’re on the mark,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide croaked, having regained her breath. “The young barbarian fears what’s to come.”

I rose against the weight of command, and I fell. I saw another crone, in another place. Another time. Heard her eerie, rasping voice.

Beware the Ides of March

I didn’t need a soothsayer to tell me what I already knew. My future was hopelessly grim.

Selene added her weight to my exercise, sitting on my feet so they wouldn’t slide on the mosaic floor or lift up. She crossed her arms on my knees and set her chin upon them, considering me seriously.

“They’re only teasing you,” she said, her veil shifting as she shook her head. “The gods don’t speak to us anymore. They couldn’t give you a prophecy even if they wanted to.”

A sandal struck her in the side of the head. The Scarlet Oracle cried out, flinching back.

“Arrogant girl, telling me what I can’t do.” The Oracle of the Broken Tide struggled against the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis, the old crone doing her level best to throw her other sandal. “I’ve taken naps longer than you’ve been alive!”

“Just because you look like you’re older than dirt doesn’t make it true!” Selene shot back, immediately ducking the second sandal. It whistled sharply as it cut through the air and drove through the stone of the far wall.

“Honestly, Dona, she’s just a child!” The Oracle of the Brazen Aegis scolded her counterpart, wrestling the old woman’s arms back with some effort. Dona spat.

“If she’s old enough to be a wife, she’s old enough to get beaten.”

The soothsayers from the Brazen Aegis Cult and the Howling Wind Cult exchanged long-suffering looks across the courtyard, their tripods situated opposite from one another.

“Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three-”

“Perhaps we’ve taken the wrong track,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles mused, and I felt her gaze as a physical thing. Something that went beyond the influence I could detect with my Sophic sense, deeper and more vibrant. I shivered as it ghosted up and down my body. “These are our leisure hours, aren’t they? Perhaps the son of Rome has something he can deliver to us.”

Selene frowned, head tilting towards her fellow soothsayer.

“Certainly not good conversation,” Dona said derisively.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the woman with the gold-gloss lips said, smiling slowly. “I’m quite enjoying what he’s saying right now.”

I stopped, halfway through my situp. Her smile widened.

“Oh no, please. Continue.”

I stared hard at the holy woman. Then, slowly, I completed my situp.

“Forty.”

Dona scoffed. “It’s a wonder he knows how to count. Be truthful, boy - when’s the last time you had a real conversation, without any moody deflections?”

I looked the salty old bitch in her blind eyes and said flatly, “Bar.”

Behind her, the Brazen Aegis’ Oracle fought a smile. “Ba ba?”

I nodded. “Bar.”

“Ba, bar ba,” Selene added.

“Every generation thinks they’re cleverer than the one that came before,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide said sourly. “When they’re always, always less.”

“In fairness,” said the Oracle of the Hurricane Heights, “you don’t make for good conversation either.”

“Haa? Is the whistling shrew running her mouth again? All I can hear is the wind.”

“Keep going,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles urged me, ignoring her peers with practiced ease. “Let’s see forty-one.” Her lips curved, wickedly amused. “Or perhaps a different movement? Something for the hips?”

Selene shoved me back into the rest position. “Forty-one,” she said firmly, and I resigned myself to more situps.

The holy women of the Greek faith continued to bicker and chat among themselves, occasionally prodding at me verbally to see what I would do. I suffered it in silence when I could, focusing on the burn of my body coming apart in small degrees so that it could be remade better, stronger than before. I was drenched in sweat by the time Socrates finally stepped out of the late kyrios’ quarters and into the courtyard. He had a finger dug into his right ear and a scowl on his face.

“Of all the world’s mysteries,” he said irritably, “the one that baffles me the most is how our late lord could relax for a single moment down here with all of you.”

Dona tilted her head his way, blind eyes swiveling as they sought out his voice.

“No,” he said before she could speak, holding out a hand. “Enough of you. I cut my dwelling out of the highest visible point on Kaukoso Mons, and some nights I swear I can still hear you barking. I’d sleep inside the storm crown if I thought it would be enough to block you out.”

The Oracle of the Broken Tide cackled, and Socrates rubbed his wrinkled brow.

“How was your afternoon, boy?” he asked me. I glanced up at him, arms trembling as I fought to maintain my plank position with the weight of command and Selene both sitting on my back.

“Tiring.”

Socrates snorted. “Good, that’s another lesson learned. Some say that cultivation only makes us more of what we are - that applies to women just the same. They only become more insufferable the further they advance.”

The philosopher raised his hand and caught a sandal before it could strike his temple, glancing scornfully at the side of the octagonal courtyard reserved for The Coast. The Oracle of the Brazen Aegis averted her eyes, putting her other sandal back on her left foot.

“Shall I tell poor Daphnis that you said that?” Dona asked, blind eyes crinkling deviously.

Socrates sneered. “Tell her whatever you like. I’ve said it to her face enough times already.”

“What an awful man,” the Howling Wind Cult’s soothsayer lamented.

“You mustn’t become like him,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles said, beckoning me to her. “It’s unnatural for man to despise woman as he does. This one will teach you everything you need to know in his stead.” For the first time, I saw that there was a thin line of color tattooed down her tongue, the same golden shade as her lips.

Socrates stepped over me, blocking her from my line of sight. As if I would be swayed so easily-

I scowled. “What are you doing?”

“... Just in case,” Selene said, covering my eyes with her hands. “Chara can be, ah, tempting when she wants to be.”

The Oracles were meant to be crones, that had always been my understanding of them. But aside from the Oracle of the Broken Tide, the others that I’d met seemed more like mothers just out of their prime than anything else. Chara’s laugh in answer to Selene‘s warning was most definitely not the cackle of an old woman. Though it unsettled me all the same.

“I won’t be tempted,” I said firmly, shaking her hands away and pushing myself to my feet. Selene rolled smoothly off my back, smiling innocently at the look I gave her.

“See that you aren’t,” Socrates advised. “Vigilance, always.” He clapped my shoulder and nodded back at the kyrios’ commandeered quarters. He moved, and I followed.

“He’ll never find a wife if he takes your advice,” Dona heckled. “Is that what you want for your poor student? A life of lonely isolation?”

“By all means, marry,” Socrates said over his shoulder, sarcasm dripping from every word. “If you’re fortunate enough to find a good wife, you’ll be happy. If not, you’ll become a philosopher.”

I shrugged. “I already am.”

Selene stumbled beside me, and the heckling rose to shrieks and cries for details. I strode quickly after my mentor, into the relative safety of the kyrios’ rooms.

Socrates slammed the heavy doors shut behind us, muffling the worst of the holy noise. Inside, I found the residence had changed. Socrates had kicked me out into the courtyard earlier so that he could attend to some unexplained business within the kyrios’ personal rooms, and now that work was laid out before me.

Socrates had ransacked the place, tossing aside furniture and in some cases tearing it apart completely, arranging the pieces around the room in an utterly chaotic manner. The columns that preserved the structure of the underground alcove had been worn down, as if by the sea, all their straight lines and harsh edges smoothed away to rounded curves. The walls themselves, carefully carved out of the mountain, had been given the same treatment.

The blankets and clothing were gathered in the middle of the room in quasi-nests, facing one another, and the old philosopher had torn open the bed itself and scattered its feathers around several points in the room. I could see a few puddles, places where he had clearly dumped out entire jugs of water and spirit wine. I also saw, and smelled, the fires he had made of the broken down furniture.

I squinted through the smoke, utterly baffled. “Why?”

“Perfect symmetry in nature is something that does not exist,” he explained calmly, as if that explained anything at all. He stepped over a pile of burning kindling that had once been a table and sat cross-legged on one of the two nests. “So, when we seek to emulate nature in our own artificial dwellings, we must observe the same dissymmetry.”

I looked around. “What does that have to do with setting fires?”

“I’m setting the stage, boy,” he said impatiently, waving me over. Reluctantly, I complied. “Generally, we do these things out in nature, because it’s easier and a better experience overall. But as we’ve established, you’re a ridiculous child and I can’t take you anywhere until I’ve civilized you. So we’ll do what we can, now that you’ve healed up.”

I sat cross legged in the nest of silk sheets, mirroring his relaxed posture as best I could with smoke assaulting my senses. “We’re going to meditate?”

“Something like that. Close your eyes, boy.”

My eyes closed, and then opened a moment later when someone joined me in the silk nest, pressing into my side so that they could fit fully on to it. Selene settled into her own meditative stance, breathing deeply.

I looked to Socrates. The expression on his face was hard to describe.

“This isn’t an open lesson, girl.”

“I greet the master,” she said formally, bowing her head without opening her eyes. My lips twitched.

“There’s room for two,” I told my mentor. He grunted, disgusted, but shut his eyes and resumed his posture.

“Close your eyes and think of Rome,” he commanded. I obliged. “Aristotle taught you how to train your body, but it was Rome that taught you how to train your soul. We’re going to work backwards and see if we can find a Greek soul buried somewhere in the dirt.”

“Thank you,” Selene whispered, nearly too quiet to be heard over the crackling of the fires, nudging my knee with hers. I hummed and immersed myself in thoughts of home.

1.42

The Young Griffon

I wondered what Sol was up to.

”I swear by the Physician, and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this oath in this contract.“

I laid my hands in Anastasia’s, the backs of my hands pressing into her open palms. She stared into my eyes and I stared right back in hers. She was uncharacteristically serious, the somber glow of her caustic green eyes casting shadows on her black-haired features.

I recited the oath of the first physician, Hippocrates.

”To hold she who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to be a partner in life with her, and to fulfill her needs when required; to look upon her offspring as equals to my own siblings, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract; and that by the set rules, lectures, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the law of medicine, but to no others.”

As I spoke the words, I didn’t feel anything in particular. There was no rising tide of sensation or meaning within me, no profound heat where our hands met. Of course, I hadn’t expected it to be that easy. The worthwhile things in life never were.

“I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”

As if I would do such a thing, regardless of an oath.

“I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”

Assassination via poison killed one man and cursed the world with a coward. Prescribing poison for suicide cursed the world with two. Another promise that I would have fulfilled anyway.

But now came an interesting line.

In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art, so said the oath of the physician.

“In justice and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art,” I swore instead, and Anastasia‘s breath hitched. I smiled faintly and continued on before she could cut the oath short.

“I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.

“Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.”

I raised a suggestive eyebrow, and the caustic queen rolled her eyes, exasperated.

“Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.

“So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all men for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate.”

There was no flickering of pneuma, no rattling of chains around my heart as the earth was sealed to my soul, but I suppose that the words were profound enough alone. And whether or not the Fates would bind me to them, it hardly mattered. I had given my word, and so I would keep it.

“I told you what to say,” Anastasia said accusingly, withdrawing her hands from mine.

I shrugged. ”I am who I am, as you are who you are. Medicine is an entity all its own separate from the physician, so what does it matter if I practice it through the lens of my virtue instead of his?” Instead of yours?

“We haven’t even begun our first lesson yet and already you defy me. How does Solus put up with you?”

“I’m incredibly charming,” I said modestly. She scoffed.

“Incredibly cheeky, more like. But fine. Are you comfortable with the theories I've taught you?”

The Hippocratic Oath was taken only at the precipice of a physician's first work. Anastasia had warned me that she wouldn’t show me a single thing until she was satisfied with my grasp of the theory behind practical medicine, and so we had spent the last several weeks immersing ourselves in the conceptual side of human constitution.

Fortunately, my education as the young aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn had overlapped significantly with the contents. In a way, cultivation as it related to the body was simply a man practicing medicine upon himself. I knew the workings of the human physique better than most physicians in this world - if not from their particular perspective.

But Anastasia was my senior in both cultivation and medicine, and so, even if she was a coward, I would afford her the respect that the master was due. Given that I had demanded her time, it was the least she was due.

“Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood,” I recited dutifully. “The four humors that make up every liquid in the body. Their combinations and ratios determine a man’s health as they approach the perfect balance, eukrasia.”

“And the temperaments?”

“Four natures, which can show up wholly or fractionally in a man’s personality. Phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, and sanguine. Each of them corresponds to one of the humors.”

“And which pairs to which?”

“The yellow bile forms a choleric temperament and breeds aggressive, viciously ambitious men.” I thought of Sol, and saw that thought reflected in her. “They are also notoriously short-tempered.”

Anastasia rolled her wrist, urging me on.

“Black bile is the culprit for a melancholy nature, deep thinkers and deep feelers. Phlegm leads to a phlegmatic man, as inconsequential in his presence as the dominant humor in his body. Which leaves only one.”

I stood, stretching mightily and dragging fingers through my hair. “Blood, the domain of sanguine men. Charismatic, social, risk seeking-”

“Talkative,” Anastasia finished, rising to her feet. I chuckled.

“The correspondence between the temperaments and the humors is simple enough,” she said, “but if you had to place them each in a cultivator’s realm, how would you do it?”

I hummed, considering that as we progressed deeper into the wilderness that lay beyond the eastern walls of the Half-Step City. There was a thick, sprawling valley forest within a few hours of walking at a Citizen’s pace. We had set a light pace and covered it in half an hour before swearing my oath. Why the Heroine had chosen this as the site of my first practical, I couldn’t say. Perhaps an animal would be my first patient.

“In order from Civic to Tyrannic,” I eventually said, “phlegm would be the first.” Anastasia nodded, absently pressing branches and swaying vines out of our path, the limbs burning and withering away at her touch. It was an obvious first choice. The useless humor for the least of all realms.

“Next,” I mused. I gave it another moment of thought, crystallizing the order, and then nodded. “The philosopher’s yellow bile, the hero’s black bile, and the tyrant’s blood.”

“Wrong.”

“Ho? Then enlighten me, master.”

“You confused the last two,” she said, hopping absentmindedly over a deep ravine. I braced myself, and with thirty pankration hands flung my body over the gouge in the earth to land beside her. “The yellow biles lend sharpness and intelligence to the soul, which fits easily enough into the realm of philosophers.

“However, blood is the naïve humor. It lends belligerence to the soul, simplicity of the spirit. We heroic cultivators are simple-minded, and in the face of the ancient rules of nature and the unwavering domains of tyrants, a hero’s virtue is our simple, naive defiance of forces that should be greater than us in every way. The black bile, by contrast, lends constancy to the soul. It belongs to the realm of tyrants, those timeless few that reign unchallenged by the rules of nature and lesser men. Constant, always, in their designs.”

I listened intently as she spoke, took her answer in and gave it the consideration that it deserved. I examined it against my own, her reasoning and conflict with mine, and caught a withered leaf as it fell in her passing.

“I disagree.”

Anastasia glanced back at me over her shoulder, a dark eyebrow rising. “Do you now?”

“The black bile is constancy, that’s true enough,” I said, crushing the withered leaf in my fist. And when I opened my hands a moment later, the cast off was still intact, against all common sense. Held in place by my own pneuma. “But it is also perseverance. And what is a hero, if not someone who perseveres in the face of unlikely odds?”

Anastasia tilted her head. “And the blood?”

“Simplicity and naivety,” I said, letting the ruined leaf drift away on the wind in pieces. “A tyrant might take offense to you saying it, but how can they be anything less than naïve?”

Anastasia stops walking.

“We are all naïve to some degree, we cultivators of virtue,” I mused, walking past her. I had no idea where I was going, but I assumed she would stop me if I wandered off in the wrong direction. “Just as we all have blood in our bodies, to one ratio or another. But a tyrant is most naïve by far, don’t you know?”

A philosopher understood the rules of nature, and guided them to suit his ends. A hero defied those laws, and all others, existing as a monolith unto themselves. Given that, what more could a tyrant possibly be?

“The tyrant is the only cultivator that dares to think his mandate supersedes that of heaven and earth.”

A tyrant established their own laws.

Anastasia appeared in step beside me, a considering look in her eyes.

“That school of thought,” she murmured. “My, my. You really are in an irreverent one, aren’t you?”

I smiled faintly. “The temperament aligns as well. A sanguine nature is king among tyrants.”

“Not choleric?”

I thought of my father. “For a tyrant, charisma trumps ambition every time.”

Slowly, after long minutes of silent introspection between the two of us, she smiled. “An interesting answer. I like it.”

“I thank the master.”

Anastasia flicked me with a pale finger that singed the hairs on the side of my head. I laughed and returned the favor thirty-fold, raining the rosy embers of dawn upon her.

A sharp spike of pneuma in my awareness, off to the east, cut our battle short. I perked up, reaching out with the waves of my sophic sense for its source. Anastasia made a pleased sound and promptly sat down once more, cross legged on the forest floor.

“Here comes your first patient.”

The source of the pneuma made a beeline for us, and within moments a philosopher in ragged indigo attire came hurtling down from the tree line, plowing through dirt and fallen trees. He knelt in front of Anastasia, more of a controlled collapse than anything else, and heaved for breath.

He looked to be a bit older than me, with a full blond beard and a few scars around his forearms and biceps that spoke to combat experience. He wore a bronze breastplate beneath his cult attire and it was as ragged as the cloth, torn nearly apart by what I assumed was the same creature currently slung over his shoulder.

The mystiko of the Raging Heaven dumped his catch onto the ground, a mountain cat twice his size with golden claws and teeth to match. Its claws were covered in the cultivator’s blood, and aside from the spear lancing through its chest, it looks like it had given far more than it had taken in their exchange. Alas, quality had prevailed over quantity this time around.

“This lowly sophist,” the ragged hunter said between gasping breaths, bowing his head, “greets his senior sister. If it pleases the honorable heroine, I’ll just be returning to the cult.”

“It does not please me,” Anastasia said smoothly. I watched the battered philosopher tense, his eyes flickering possessively to the virtuous beast’s corpse. But it was only a momentary thing, and then the fight went out of him. He slumped and bowed his head further.

Ah. I knew what this was.

“How may I serve the heroine?” he asked, defeated.

“Take off your armor,” Anastasia commanded, and I watched the light go out of his eyes as he complied. “Your tunic as well.”

This was a shakedown.

“Now come here,” she said when the man was naked and destitute. “And tell us where it hurts.”

Or so he thought.

“What?” The Sophic cultivator asked, baffled and just barely hopeful. His eyes flickered to me, for the first time since he’d arrived, and I saw the question in them. I could have drawn it out, made a suggestive comment to give him the wrong idea, but it was difficult to tear a man down when he was naked and all but broken already.

“Come,” I said instead, beckoning him forward, and summoned the arms of my intent. “Stand before these healing hands.”

The relief nearly knocked him out cold, but the mystiko of the Raging Heaven managed to find his feet and approach us.

“Keep your pneuma to yourself this time,” Anastasia instructed me, that same cool seriousness from before settling over her spirit. She laid her hands upon the mystiko’s chest and closed her eyes. “Follow my light, and see if you can learn something. Attend.”

I laid thirty pankration hands over the man’s mangled body and did just that.

1.41

The Son of Rome

I realized very quickly that my time as Gaius’ shadow had spoiled me. My conception of what a mentor - or a patron - was, had been heavily skewed by years on campaign. In the legions, every lesson was eminently applicable to the task at hand. The skills taught were concrete, readily contextualized, and though they weren’t all easily learned, the reason I needed to know them was always clear.

As I invoked gravitas as viciously as I could while trying to complete a single push-up, only one of many such tasks laid out for the day, I wondered how I could have possibly forgotten Aristotle‘s teaching methods.

More importantly, why had I thought his master’s master would not be even more Greek about things?

“Pathetic,” Socrates declared, not the first time and certainly not the last. “You can’t even do a push-up in this state. How are you going to lead an army with a weak body like that?” I grit my teeth and strained against the weight of command, pressing down with it as hard as I could at the same time.

“How?” How could I push up while my soul pushed with everything it had down?

“With your arms, boy.”

“I beg the master,” I forced myself to say, diverting valuable breath to form the words. “Help this lowly sophist ask the proper question.”

The old man did his own push-ups beside me, pressing effortlessly through the weight of the captain’s virtue. I’d been all too happy to oblige him when he demanded that I invoke Gravitas on him, but I might as well not have done anything at all for the impact it had. Instead, the cumulative weight of its upkeep had pressed me down, down, until it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t complete a single push-up no matter how hard I struggled.

“You’re asking me how you can match your body against a manifestation of your soul, is that fair to say?”

Sweat dripped from my face. My arms trembled. “It is.”

“And what is the relation of the soul to the body?”

I didn’t have the strength for sophistry. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Up he rose, and down he fell, smoothly and in rhythm. “You’re familiar with my student’s theories on the nature of the soul, yes?”

“Three parts. Reason, spirit, and hunger.”

“Do you know what inspired that theory, which you cultivators take as simple truth?”

I bit the inside of my cheek as I started to fall, from halfway down to a third, and then to a quarter. Slowly, with such effort that I couldn’t speak at all for a moment, I stopped my descent. But no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t make back what I had lost.

“You,” I said, less because I was confident in the answer and more because a single word was all I could manage. But I was lucky, this once, and his grunt confirmed it.

“I confided in him one day the nature of my principle,” Socrates explained. “The ideal that I choose to live by, each and every day. Since I was old enough to think, I have had a daemon in my head.”

I stared at him out of the corner of my eye.

“It tells me when a thing is bad, and says nothing when a thing is good,” he said. “And so whenever I’m considering a course of action and I hear the daemon speak, I don’t do that thing.”

“That’s your principle?” I asked faintly. He rolled his eyes.

“Disappointed? Profundity and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive, boy. This world would be a far brighter place if every man listened to the voice that told him when something wasn’t worth being done.”

“At any rate, my student took a lesson from that that I had not intended to teach, peppering me with questions and eventually, years later, developing his model of the human psyche. Or, as cultivators so adore calling it, the tripartite soul.”

Socrates raised one hand off the floor so that he could tick off three fingers, continuing to do one armed push-ups through the captain’s virtue. The sight alone made me furious enough to raise myself back to the halfway point, though stars drifted across my vision as I did.

“Logistikon, thumoeidas, epithumetikon,” he recited, words that I wouldn’t have understood even a few days ago that now rang clear as common Latin in my head. Reason, spirit, hunger. “Drawing from my own story, he created a model of the soul that existed in three parts. When pressed to explain it, he called upon the allegory of the Charioteer. Have you heard it?”

“I have not.”

“Have you not heard, or have you forgotten?” Socrates demanded.

“I haven’t.” He smacked me over the back of the head, driving me back down so that my nose hovered just above the marble floor. I snarled.

“I’m not your friend, boy, and your father isn’t paying me to humor you. Watch your mouth. And tell me why the worthless student of my worthless student didn’t bother to tell you what he learned at your age?”

I focused on breathing, on a simple cadence, centering myself in memories of long afternoons drilling in the miserable heat of a Mediterranean sun. Doing push-ups and other bodyweight drills with the Fifth, suffering together. Suffering as one. I forced myself to rise and made it just barely past the halfway point.

“Aristotle told me that if I only had time to learn a few things, they might as well be useful.”

Socrates laughed.

“Arrogant brat. After all these years they’re still at each other’s throats. I suppose I have no reason to be surprised - I know where they got it from. Allow me to fill this particular gap for you, then.

“My student explained the tripartite soul in terms of a charioteer. A man in a chariot is pulled by two horses, one ornery and blacker than night, the other snow white and passionate. The charioteer represents reason, or in this case the self. The black horse represents the hunger, man’s covetous desires. The white horse represents our spirit, the positive impulses of our hearts.

“The charioteer holds the reins of both horses, and manages them both as they clash with one another. Reason guides the soul, masters both desire and passion, and maintains the course. This is how a man aligns himself with the divine. Ascension is a circuit, and we are all racing along the track, doing our best not to stray. The daemon that I described to him is the charioteer, the negative impulses it warns me away from are the black horse, and the positive impulses it stays quiet on are the white horse.

“And what does that have to do with the body?” I asked. He nodded in approval.

“Consider the components described. It’s easy to imagine the three elements of the soul in an abstract sense. But if you were to describe them physically, how would you do it?”

I frowned. When I asked Gaius a question, so long as it was a question worth answering, he would answer it without fanfare. With Socrates, if I was lucky, I would receive another question.

“The hunger is the easiest comparison,” I finally said.

“Of course.” Socrates waved for me to continue.

“Hunger for prestige or power, those are abstract things. Spiritual hunger. But the body hungers for food, for water, and for… carnal things. The hunger comes from the stomach.”

“And what of the spirit?”

It felt like it went against the purpose of the question, but I immediately drew from recent experiences within the Half-Step City.

“The heart,” I said, thinking of burning eyes and heroic spirits. “That, or the blood.”

“And what leads you to believe that?”

“When a hero is impassioned, the heart flames in their eyes flare or flicker to match their mood. But more than that, anyone can feel the pressure of grief or joy in their chest. It’s… painfully physical.”

“Reason?”

“The head,” I said after a long moment.

“Why?”

“When I try to make sense of why Greeks are the way they are, it hurts.”

Socrates slapped me again. This time I managed to hold my place.

“Well enough. And what is virtue?”

“Performative excellence.” On this, Griffon and I had always been in agreement.

“Excellence of the soul, or excellence of the body?”

I frowned.

“All too often, cultivators consider virtue to be an expression of the soul and the soul alone,” Socrates said, progressing from simple one-handed push-ups to more advanced two finger variants. “Intuitively, it’s easy to understand why. Virtue is something many men never truly grasp. It is depth and it is complexity, which we naturally attribute to the nebulous realms of the soul. But what did we just discuss?”

“The elements of the tripartite soul can be physical as well as abstract,” I mused, beginning to see. “The hunger, the spirit, and the reason can be attributed to the body as much as they can to the soul. So why should virtue be any different?”

“Unity in all things is best,” Socrates said. “Unity of the body and the soul most of all. If a man is living his life the proper way, the virtue of his body and the virtue of his soul will be in perfect synchronicity with one another.”

It struck me like a lightning bolt, and in the same moment my arms gave out beneath me.

“Split foundations,” I gasped, panting for breath.

I couldn’t do a push up while laboring under the captain’s virtue because my foundations were split. I couldn’t rise against the weight of my soul because my body was not its equal. Out of sync.

“You begin to see,” he said approvingly, rising to his feet and slapping the dust from his palms. “In our efforts to understand cultivation, as we strive to understand all things, we create terms and stratifications. Citizen, Philosopher, Hero, and Tyrant. Principle, passion, and purpose. And of course, virtue. Each of these concepts is connected, unified in the same way that the body and the soul are, and their tripartite components within. It all begins with virtue. And it all ends with virtue just the same.”

“Fates and Muses forbid it be simple,” I said between ragged breaths. Socrates chuckled.

“The world would be a boring place if every man could understand it by the time he was twenty. Come, let’s do some sit ups.”

I wondered how Griffon was faring.

Interlude 3.2 [Myron Aetos]

The Little Kyrios

In the aftermath of his discourse with his eldest cousin, Myron realized something that should have been evident to him from the beginning. Actions had consequences. He’d been enlightened, that was true, but his parents didn’t see it in quite the same light that he did.

For an entire week, Myron languished in his mother’s care. He wasn’t allowed to see his eldest cousin, let alone speak to him or seek his guidance, and most of his time was spent in bed recovering from his wounds. The one time he had managed to catch his father while his mother was away and begged him for an escape, Stavros Aetos had only shaken his head and ruffled Myron‘s hair, fondly scolding him.

“If you didn’t want to be smothered like this, you shouldn’t have lost.”

The lesson was bitterly learned, but he had no choice. The youngest son of the Rosy Dawn accepted the punishment for his hubris and did what he could while confined to quarters. He studied manically and circulated his pneuma while pretending to sleep. As soon as he could prove that he was healed, he raced out into the central courtyards of the Rosy Dawn in search of fresh air.

He was promptly found by Niko, and before Myron realized what was happening his eldest cousin had thrown him over his broad shoulder like a sack of grain and leapt off of the eastern mountain range.

Myron hollered into the wind, first in terror and then in wild exhilaration. He stretched his arms out and spread his fingers wide, trying to catch the wind in his hands as they hurtled over the Scarlet City. In what felt like no time at all, and simultaneously an eternity later, the western mountain range rushed forward to meet them.

Niko exhaled sharply, the sound of it somehow piercing through the howling of the wind. And though they struck the mountain hard enough that Myron was certain it should have shattered like it did when Uncle Damon conducted the rites, their impact produced no sound and left no marks on the stone. Myron bumped sharply off his cousin’s shoulder, catching himself on his hands and rolling to his feet. It certainly didn’t feel like he had just flown across the full length of a city.

In the distance of a clear blue sky, he heard a faint rumble.

“Good afternoon, cousin,” Niko said, lifting up his left leg just enough to stretch out his ankle, then alternating and pulling his right knee up to his chest. He favored Myron with a wry smile. “Feeling well-rested?”

“I was rested six days ago,” Myron said, and then accusingly added, “You left me to rot!”

“Aunt Raisa was far too furious with me to approach you in your room,” the youngest Hero of the Rosy Dawn explained. “To tell you the truth, Uncle Stavros wasn’t exactly pleased with me either. When a Hero and a Citizen exchange discourse, it’s a very fine line between guidance and gratuity. I had no business being in that octagon with you.”

That wasn’t true, and Myron didn’t appreciate it being phrased that way for his benefit. They both knew that it was him that had no business being in that octagon with Niko.

“I’m the one who challenged you,” he insisted. Though he knew trivialities like facts hardly mattered to his parents when it came to him. Niko laughed and threw an arm around his shoulder, pulling him into a side embrace.

“That you did. But I’m the one that accepted.”

“I didn’t die, and I wasn’t crippled,” he muttered. It was petulant, beneath a young pillar. But sometimes he just couldn’t help it. “We’re cultivators, aren’t we? Why should it matter that you were stronger? No one is favored to win when they challenge the Fates.”

Niko blinked and looked down at him. “Who taught you to say things like that?”

Myron flushed. He’d said the words with confidence, but it was embarrassing to be called out on it. He had no idea how Lio made it sound so natural when he spoke like this.

He was saved from answering by the distant screams of his cousins, rapidly growing closer, and the rising sound of thunder on a cloudless day. One by one, Niko’s Heroic companions came crashing back down to earth with the other young pillars in their arms. Myron watched with some satisfaction as Heron and Rena sprawled onto their hands and knees upon landing - it was nice to know he hadn’t been the only one taken by surprise. Castor, being the most graceful of the five of them by far, managed to catch his balance after only a couple hopping steps, and Niko‘s wife held Lydia around the waist while she got her bearings before letting go.

“What was that!?” Heron gasped, coming shakily up to one knee. He looked to Niko, wild-eyed, and then to the tall, tanned hero in hybrid finery and weathered pirate garb - with a coarse black beard to match - that had carried him clear across the city. “You said it was within spitting distance!”

“It is,” the raggedly rich Heroic cultivator said, canted green eyes burning mischievously. He turned his head and pursed his lips, and with a sound like cracking stone he spat back in the direction of the Rosy Dawn.

Myron watched the spittle shoot through the air faster than an arrow from a bow and vanish into the distance. His upper lip twitched.

“Look!” The Heroine that had carried Rena exclaimed, slapping the noble sailor over the head. “Even the boy is disgusted with you!” He shoved her away, a challenging glint in his smile, and her long red hair shivered and rose up ever so slightly around her as her heroic flames burned.

“Now now,” Iphys Aetos chided, moving over to her husband and wrapping an arm around his waist, sandwiching Myron in between the two of them. “Behave in front of the children.” Even as she said it, she shared an amused little smirk with Niko. Myron got the feeling they had exchanges like this often.

“What’s going on, Niko?” Lydia asked, helping Rena to her feet. “Is this…”

Myron looked between their other three cousins as best he could with his face sandwiched between two powerful thighs, uneasy. Among the three of them, Rena would be the most sympathetic by far to the agreement to pursue that Lydia and Myron had made with Niko. Castor would almost surely betray them to their parents, and Heron - well, he didn’t want to think about how his older brother would react.

This couldn’t be the private tutoring that Niko had promised them, then. Could it?

“I’ve been thinking,” Niko began.

“Impossible,” the Hero that had carried Castor said at once. Niko rolled his eyes, ignoring him.

“Since I exchanged discourse with Myron here-”

“Since you beat the little lord like he owed you money,” the Heroine with the blood red hair corrected him laughingly. Niko ignored her too.

“That you’ve all grown into magnificent Citizens since I left,” he said fondly, favoring each of them with a warm smile, pure white teeth complimenting deeply tanned skin and tousled black hair. “Most of you are grasping at virtue already, and I’m sure sooner than later you’ll all be brushing up against the Sophic realm. I’m proud of you all.”

It was hard not to stand taller at praise from the prodigy of prodigies. Heron puffed up, nudging Castor with an elbow and exchanging pleased grins. Rena ducked her head, smiling with restrained pleasure that only Myron could tell was just slightly smug around its edges.

Lydia accepted the praise, but she didn’t smile. Myron decided to voice what they were both thinking.

“If we’re magnificent, what does that make you?”

That took the wind out of their sails as surely as anything. Myron felt bad, seeing Rena’s face fall and his own brother’s fists clench, the dull edge to Castor’s sigh. But he didn’t regret saying it.

“It makes me Nikolas,” answered the Scarlet Hero. His wife stroked her thumb comfortingly across Myron’s cheek. “Who I am doesn’t take anything away from you, cousin.”

When Myron didn’t reply, Niko reached down and picked him up, sitting him on his broad shoulders. Myron struggled and thrashed like a landed fish, indignant at the childish treatment, but a Hero’s grip was not so easily slipped. Niko started up the mountain path to the Burning Dusk Cult, having landed just outside of its valence estates, and his companions fell into step around him. The young pillars hurried to keep pace.

“That gloom has also been on my mind,” Niko said, slapping Myron‘s hand away when he tried to twist his older cousin’s ear. “It’s one thing to be hungry for the next step. It’s good to have lofty goals, even, so long as you’re honest. But you have to be realistic as well.”

Myron frowned. The sentiment rang false in his ear, like the time Sol had snapped one of the strings on his lyre mid-song. Grating to the senses.

“It’s all unrealistic, from the very start. What’s reasonable about looking up at the stars in the sky and deciding you want them for yourself?” he asked, and immediately felt the tips of his ears burn when the pirate guffawed. The Heroine with the crimson hair hushed him, but she wasn’t quite able to hide her own amusement.

“The little lord is a philosopher already,” the Hero that had carried Castor observed. Myron buried his face in his hands.

When Niko spoke, the amusement of his companions was noticeably absent.

“That right there,” he said quietly. “That’s why we’re here.”

They stepped onto the scarlet steps of the junior mystikos’ quarters, and through the gaps in his fingers Myron saw initiates of the Burning Dusk rushing out of the streets, hiding behind marble pillars and down residential halls. They fled like mice before hunting cats, and the Heroic cultivators among them took no notice of it. As if it was entirely reasonable to have this sort of effect on people.

“What do you know of advancement?” Niko asked, and after a beat added, “That’s a question for all five of you.”

Heron answered first, standing tall. “Cultivators advance exponentially. One rank in a realm above is worth all ten in the realm below.”

“We advance in three parts,” Castor said, biting his lip thoughtfully. “In reason, in spirit, and in hunger.”

“The further we advance, the more impurities we cleanse ourselves of,” Rena murmured.

Lydia glanced east, to the Rosy Dawn and the Ionian Sea beyond. “To advance is to move forward,” she said. “Without ever looking back.”

“Myron?” Niko prompted him.

What else could he say?

“It only makes you more of what you are.”

Niko sighed. “You’re all correct, to various degrees, but what causes advancement? What is the root of the divine struggle? I know your parents haven’t told you yet.”

It was Niko’s wife that supplied the answer, while his companions gazed wistfully up.

“A Citizen can live their entire life without ever advancing to the Sophic Realm, and they can be happy,” Iphys said, threading her fingers through her husband‘s. “They can develop their pneuma beautifully, embody their virtue in all things, and never once progress past the tenth rank of the Civic Realm. Aside from being human, there is no particular thread that connects all citizens.”

“But every cultivator in the Sophic Realm and beyond has one thing in common,” Niko continued. He tilted his head back, regarding Myron seriously. “They are all, each and every one of them, discontented.”

Myron blinked.

“A Philosopher is someone that couldn’t stand a Citizen’s life,” spoke the Heroine with the crimson hair. “Whatever their reasons, whatever their virtues and philosophies. At the end of the day, the final requirement for ascension has always been a refusal to accept life as it is.”

“What does that have to do with the Burning Dusk?” Heron asked. They had progressed past the outer estates now, coming up on the central pavilion with its heroic sentinel statues and grand fountain. The Burning Dusk Cult was a mirror image of the Rosy Dawn in nearly every way, down to the statue of a man standing in the center of the pavilion’s fountain, filling it with a steady stream of water from its palm. The only difference was that it was the opposite hand from the one at the Rosy Dawn’s fountain.

“You’re all impatient to grow, some more than others,” Niko said. Lydia looked away. “And I understand that. I’ve stood in your place. But before I can watch you all tumble off the side of the cliff with a smile and a wave, I have to be sure that it’s your own restlessness driving you. Not our uncle’s.”

Myron sat up ramrod straight on his cousin’s shoulders.

“What are you saying, Niko?” Lydia asked him, razor focused.

“Manufacturing prodigies is something that every great civilization has tried to do since we were first molded from formless clay,” he explained. “It’s never worked on a grand scale, of course, because cultivation is a journey of the soul, and every soul is unique - its own star in the boundless sky.”

“But,” Myron said quietly.

“But,” Niko allowed, “while manufacturing the talent needed to advance is a fool’s dream, manufacturing discontent is not.”

“Not for the kyrios,” Iphys said, her voice hushed. The rest of the heroes exchanged tense looks.

They reached the central pavilion, impossibly deserted for this time of day. The sun was still high in the sky. Niko strode purposefully up to the central fountain in the pavilion.

“Not for Uncle Damon,” he agreed. Then he reared back and kicked the lip of the marble fountain.

The young pillars of the Rosy Dawn stared, aghast, at the shattered remains of the Burning Dusk’s central edifice, and the gaping maw of a tunnel beneath it.

“Did you know,” Niko said conversationally, moving deftly over the rubble, “that the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk used to mingle with one another during their initiation rites? Instead of one day being devoted entirely to the trials of hunger, spirit, and reason, initiates spent one night contemplating the mystery of the dawn, and they spent another night contemplating the dusk.”

They ventured down into the tunnel, so familiar and yet so strange, and only now did someone finally dare to confront them. Myron looked back just in time to see the Heroic pirate in his finery heft a chunk of rubble the size of a chariot in his hands and slam it into place behind them, just as Gianni Scala himself came sprinting down the steps of the main estate towards the pavilion.

“The practice ended after centuries of precedent, when our uncles returned home from their adventures and Uncle Damon took the Rosy Dawn in his hand.” Niko raised his own hand and scarlet flames erupted in his palm, illuminating the mosaics embedded in the walls of the mountain tunnel. “He separated the two cults entirely and forbade them from sharing in their rites. I was able to visit this place once before I left, but only because your fathers smuggled me in.”

Myron had never even heard of such a practice. Looking at the faces of his brother and cousins, he knew that they hadn’t either.

“Why would he do that?” Rena asked weakly.

“There’s a lot that goes into pursuing virtue,” Niko said, prompting a round of firm nods from his companions. “Especially for those of us privileged enough to take part in the cults of greater mystery. These mysteries define us. They make our virtue what it is.”

Niko had said he wanted to make sure that their restlessness was their own.

The bisected corpse of the fallen sun god was only one half of a body.

“What happens if you only see half the mystery?” Myron asked, though he had a sickening feeling that he already knew.

In the scarlet light of his rosy palm, Niko’s smile was bleak.

“They say the father split us at our conception, that every human being is only half of a greater whole. That’s why we seek out companions. It’s why we marry.” Iphys squeezed his hand tight. “It’s human nature to seek completion. It’s only natural to be restless when you only have half of the full picture.

“How can you possibly solve a mystery when you’ve only seen half of it?”

They descended into the cavernous tomb of another bisected corpse from the same fallen sun god, and as they reverently watched the dusk fall into its incomprehensible palm, Myron felt something slide into place within him. Some primal itch that he had never known he needed to scratch until this very moment. He felt his entire soul relax.

And he knew.

Lio would never be satisfied, no matter how far he ventured, no matter what sights he saw. Because a part of him, however large or small, would hunger endlessly for this. For something the outside world couldn’t provide him. Something he should have had from the start. All because of their uncle.

Lio’s father had starved him.

Myron’s pneuma surged, doubling and redoubling as his soul advanced to the eighth rank of the civic realm. It was enough to break the spell the bisected corpse had over the young pillars of the Rosy Dawn, make them turn to him in shock and confused elation. The Heroic cultivators, by contrast, were entirely subdued.

“Are you restless, cousin?” Niko asked him with that quiet intent.

Of course, the answer was yes.

Interlude 3.1 [Myron Aetos]

The Little Kyrios

The first day after Lio left the Rosy Dawn was the longest, and the most difficult. There were tears, anguish, frustrations, and above all else a horrible fear. After that first day, they stifled their tears and hid their anguish, putting the fear for their cousin out of their minds as best they could. The second day was not easier, but it passed quicker.

The third day was even quicker than that. Finally, they made it through the first week. And then, in no time at all, two. Suddenly three.

It helped to have a goal.

Myron ducked beneath a senior mystiko’s lashing strike, the wooden practice blade whistling over his head. From an early age he had been taught to leverage every advantage that his body provided, no matter how old he happened to be, or what size his body was. Against an opponent like this, nearly twice his height, his stature allowed him to dodge certain attacks more easily. His speed allowed him to maneuver through the older cultivator’s guard.

And child or not, he still carried the strength of a seventh rank Civic cultivator within his soul. Myron spun into the opposing cultivator’s guard rather than away from his sword, and drove every ounce of his momentum and the full force of his pneuma into an elbow to the kidney.

The senior cultivator, an eighteen-year-old in the sixth rank of the civic realm, dropped his practice blade and collapsed, wheezing. Myron caught it out of the air and tossed it from hand to hand, changing grips until it felt comfortable enough to use. The opponent before this one had fought with his fists, and so Myron had done the same upon beating him. Now, he would try the blade.

“This lowly sophist thanks you for your guidance,” he said formally, bowing to the gasping mystiko. He offered him a hand.

He took it and rose, holding his side. “And I thank the little lord for his instruction.” Myron rolled his eyes at the nickname, and the older cultivator chuckled, patting his shoulder and staggering out of the marble octagon.

Myron turned to regard the gymnasiarch and his audience, a collection of boys his age as well as older cultivators that had been drawn first out of curiosity, and then by the novel prospect of trading discourse with a young pillar of the Rosy Dawn. He waved invitingly, and after a moment another young man with his arms and hands wrapped in scarlet bandages took to the octagon.

The gymnasiarch leaned his elbows on the edge of the octagon, the upraised platform standing nearly at chest height for a grown man. He raised an eyebrow at Myron.

“Are you sure, son? You’re due a break.”

He mastered his impatience, brushed damp curls of hair from his eyes, and nodded firmly.

“I’ll be fine, sir.”

He’d only fought a couple dozen times so far, and most of those early on had been boys his own age. Uninspiring opponents, if he was being honest with himself, though he hadn’t said that to their faces. They had given him all they had and didn’t deserve such a blow to the ego.

Myron could keep going. Myron had to keep going. He knew that Lio could have fought this entire gymnasium without faltering. And he would have won every time.

“I offer my greetings to the little lord,” his opponent said, bowing his head deeply. Myron rolled the blade of wood in his hand and nodded.

“Raise your head and greet the dawn.”

His opponent flashed him a grin and they both erupted into violence.

A minute later, maybe two, the older cultivator flew off the side of the marble octagon, a straight thrust that would have skewered him through the heart if it had been a live iron blade instead pushing him firmly out of bounds. Myron caught the leading edge of the wrap on his right hand as he went, unraveling it from the cultivator’s arm and wrapping it around his own. He tossed the practice blade aside.

“My thanks,” he said again, exchanging polite words with the mystiko, who seemed caught between indignation and amusement, before turning once again to regard his audience.

Cultivation is the sum of lived experiences. Lio and Sol had told him that almost a year ago, and it had been exactly what he needed to learn at the time. Now he found himself falling back on that advice, searching out new opponents, new weapons, new styles of fighting. Anything it took, he would do. Lio had shown him the difference between heaven and earth on the night of Nikolas’ wedding. If they wanted to bring him back, Myron would have to bridge that gap.

But they were so weak.

“Cousin,” a deep, concerned voice said to him sometime later, breaking him from a trance he hadn’t noticed himself slipping into. Myron panted for breath, dragging a hand down his face and coming away with so much sweat it was as if he’d dipped it in a pool. At his feet, two cultivators of the fourth and fifth Civic rank respectively lay crumpled and beaten.

Myron looked at the blunt daggers in his hands, each forged of rounded bronze, and dented from the impacts of his attacks. They clattered to the surface of the marble octagon as he knelt to help his opponents to their feet.

Only once they were shuffling off to the baths on the other side of the gymnasium, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, did Myron turn and greet his cousin.

“Niko.”

“How long have you been at this?” the new young aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn asked, approaching the octagon with a frown. Mystikos hurriedly parted from his path, gazing with naked admiration at the sight of a truly heroic body. Niko still had a tunic wrapped around his waist, but he made for an impressive sight nonetheless. Myron sized him up, compared his physique to Lio’s, and then to his own.

His father had always said that the body was a divine reflection of the soul. That every chiseled muscle was the work of countless hours in the gymnasium and on the battlefield. Lio had the physique of someone who had put in far more hours than Myron, who had cultivated his soul in earnest for longer than Myron had been alive. Niko was a level beyond even that.

Niko waved a hand in front of his face. Myron blinked, realizing that his mind had been wandering. How long had he been in the gymnasium, anyway?

He glanced at the gymnasiarch in askance, and the old man shook his head in stern disapproval.

To Niko, the gymnasiarch said, “He’s been here since this morning.”

“This morning- Myron, it’s nearly dinner time,” he said, the concern redoubling. Behind him, closer to the baths, Myron spotted his cousin’s male companions, currently in the process of bathing while initiates of the Rosy Dawn drifted around and worked up the courage to speak to them.

“I’m fine,” he said belatedly. His limbs felt heavy and weak, and he still hadn’t quite caught his breath, but he could keep going. Griffon would have kept going.

This much was nothing.

“I think you’re done for the day,” Niko said, not unkindly, and held out a hand. “Come on, let’s get you washed up and fed. I don’t have any obligations for a few hours; how about I tell you a story of my time in the Alabaster Isles?”

“Not yet,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’m not finished yet.”

Those clear blue flames behind his cousin’s eyes flickered. He considered Myron, seriously, and that meant more to Myron than he could put into words. It was why he had always looked up to Lio and Niko so much. Even when he was hardly a cultivator at all, they had never treated him like a child.

“When will it be enough?” Niko asked him, in that heavy, layered tone of voice that Myron had learned early on meant there was more than one thing being said. In the privacy of his own thoughts, he called it the Lio voice.

Myron gathered back up his daggers of blunted bronze, squaring his shoulders. “It’ll be enough when I’ve grown.”

Niko smiled ruefully. “No. It won’t.”

“Just one more, then,” Myron pressed. “One more and I’ll take a bath.”

Niko exchanged a glance with the gymnasiarch, and Myron silently pleaded with his eyes for the old man to agree. After a long moment he sighed and shook his head, scratching at a long gray beard.

“He’s got enough left for one,” he allowed, and Niko nodded.

“One more, then. Who will face the young terror?” Niko glanced around, his good humor turning to puzzlement when no one raised a hand. He looked over the mystikos of the Rosy Dawn, following their shocked gazes all the way back to Myron.

Back to the finger Myron was pointing at his cousin.

“Nikolas Aetos,” he said in his most demanding voice. He would have pitched it deeper, but whenever he did that people tended to smile rather than shrink. “Step into the marble octagon with me.”

Someone laughed.

His cousin got the strangest look on his face.

After the first initiate laughed, the rest of the crowd was soon to follow. There wasn’t any cruel intent behind it, Myron could tell, but it still made his teeth grind. This was the reality of things. This was how far his cousin was above him, that the suggestion alone of a fight was laughable.

Over at the baths, his cousin’s companions leaned on the edge of the pools and put their hands around their mouths, calling out to him and to Myron.

“Someone’s finally called you out, Niko!”

“Your hubris ends tonight!”

“Send him to Tartarus, little Lord!”

The taunts and the jeering flew throughout the gymnasium, drawing the eyes of those that hadn’t already been watching. The crowd grew. Myron ignored them all, ignored his exhaustion, and continued to steadily point. He met Niko‘s eyes without hesitation.

Finally, just when he had begun to doubt himself, his cousin nodded and jumped up onto the octagon. The gymnasium erupted in cheers, naked boys and men alike rushing over to watch the spectacle up close. Only Niko‘s companions remained in the baths, content to heckle and watch from afar with their heroic senses.

The gymnasiarch was frowning severely, staring hard at Niko. Myron‘s oldest cousin settled into a stance across from him, taking up the wooden practice sword that Myron had dropped several fights ago.

Disguising the motion with several flashy twirls of the practice sword, Niko leaned in and spoke quietly enough that no one but Myron could have possibly heard him.

“Are you sure?”

Myron nodded once, with finality. That night, Lio had shown him the difference between heaven and earth, the vast difference between the two of them. But it wasn’t enough to bridge that gap. Myron knew Lio. He was certain, down to his bones, that the former young aristocrat had already grown in the weeks since he’d left. Myron knew he wouldn’t stop.

It wasn’t enough to know how far he had to go to reach the man that Lio had been. He had to know where Lio was headed, the man he would be.

Niko searched his eyes for any hesitation, and when he didn’t find any he sighed and nodded in return. Myron bowed his head in thanks.

“Rise,” Nikolas Aetos commanded, “and greet the dawn.”

Myron inhaled sharply, gripping his daggers tight, and looked up. The scarlet flames behind his cousin’s eyes erupted like bonfires, and his heroic pneuma flooded the gymnasium. Myron tensed, leaping back-

He woke up in a feather bed, surrounded by his cousins. Rena was slumped halfway onto the bed, asleep in her chair with Myron‘s left hand held in both of hers. Castor was right there with her, one arm precariously propping his head up while he dozed. Heron sat with his arms crossed, bags under his eyes as he glared across the room.

Lydia was over by the door, trying and failing to calm his mother down while she screamed in Niko’s face.

Heron noticed that he had woken up first, calling their mother’s name and holding hesitant hands over Myron’s arms and chest, which ached horribly. Then his mother was there, brushing her eldest aside and assaulting him with frenzied questions about what happened, who was to blame, what he had been thinking. Rena and Castor snapped awake, sagging in relief when they saw him awake. It made Myron feel horribly guilty.

But not regretful. He met Lydia’s eyes over his mother’s shoulder, and though her expression was stern, he knew she understood. Then he looked past her, to Niko at the door, and smiled weakly in gratitude. He had already known the distance he needed to travel to stand where Lio had stood that night. Now he knew how much further he needed to go beyond that to get to where he was going.

Niko stared at him for a long moment. Then he turned, and walked out the door.

Interlude 2.2 [Old 'Zalus] [OLYMPIA ARC: PART 1 END]

Old ‘Zalus

The room was large but modestly furnished, barren by the standards of most made men. Its floors were polished marble, pure and unblemished by gemstone veins. What furniture that there was, a massive cypress bed frame and side tables of the same wood, was all finely kept but notable for its lack of adornment. There were no paintings, no statues or sacred treasures. It was as humble a home as any man could have.

And yet, that did not change what it was. The lack of overt majesty made it no less potent.  No less his. The response to intruders here was just the same as in the most palatial estate.

“I’m going to kill you, Gadfly,” Polyzalus promised the man intruding upon his place. It was an insult that no tyrant worth their title would tolerate. After all.

A Tyrant’s domain was the throne of their soul.

“Good evening to you too, Zalus,” Socrates said, brushing the weight of a Tyrant’s displeasure off his shoulders. “I’ve come to bargain.”

The Gadfly, pest among pests, strode into Polyzalus’ domain as brazenly as he did everything else, passing by the bed and side tables without a second glance on his way to the wide open terrace. That he didn’t hesitate even for a moment is the only reason Polyzalus didn’t kill him where he stood.

But the urge was strong. It always was.

“I have nothing to give you, and you have never had anything worth wanting,” the tyrant dismissed the philosopher.

Idly, in another place and another part of himself, the Rein-Holder listened through the ears of his faithful shadows as they left to do their dark work. These aspects of himself, the shards of the Tyrant that was Scarlet Polyzalus, existed in his perception in the same way that the shadows they epitomized did. Silhouettes without true detail. Impressions and whispered half-truths.

It was enough to know when his crows were on the hunt. The rest would be revealed to him when the shadows of himself were re-gathered to the whole. Assuming, of course, that they were not devoured first.

“Fortunately for the both of us, nothing is exactly what I came here to bargain for,” Socrates said, sitting cross legged on the marble floor with his back to the stone rails of the terrace.

“Deal, then. Now leave.”

“That’s no way to treat a guest.”

Polyzalus paused in his work, and in his far seeing as well, and leveled the Gadfly with the pressure of his authority. Socrates met his eyes just long enough to make his worthless point before allowing his head to bow.

“You haven’t been my guest in over four hundred years,” the true tyrant of the Burning Dusk said, and his conviction made it so. Within these plain walls and upon this marble floor, the word of the First-to-Burn was natural law.

And yet Socrates found it within himself to reach outside of that new natural order, and make a nuisance of himself as always.

“What would our father in heaven think, to hear you cast aside xenia so callously?”

Night was falling, casting shadows in the room. Polyzalus reached out with the crystallized purpose of his ravenous soul and from nothing declared something, burning out of non-existence several sunset lanterns that drifted like fireflies into his domain. With his hands, he dipped an unstained cloth into a basin of water and twisted it, gently ringing out the bulk of the moisture.

“There are no gods left to punish such things,” he said, taking her arm in his hand and setting to his work with the damp cloth.

“Is that so? Is that what you truly believe?”

“Near enough.”

These days, it made little difference.

“Then disregard the pantheon,” Socrates said, unwinding sash after sash from around himself and casting them to the wind. “What would you think, four hundred years ago, to see yourself now? To hear your own voice uttering such foul sentiment?”

“I wouldn’t think anything meaningful at all. I never did, in those days.”

“If not the gods, and not the you of yesterday, then is the you of today truly the sole arbiter of morality? How can you know that the ‘Zalus of tomorrow won’t disagree? If all the world tells you-”

“Not today,” Polyzalus said simply, and leveraged the weight of his purpose. Outside of his domain, he would have had to manifest his pneuma for this. But here, seated upon the humble throne of his soul, all he had to do was desire it.

And it was his.

The Gadfly shut his mouth, and it was worth every ounce of ethos that Polyzalus had invoked to achieve it. He dipped his cloth back in the basin of water, wringing it once more.

Alas, it didn’t last. “I’ll be brief, then.”

“Will you?” The first son to burn mused, brushing back golden hair the same shade as his own and wetting her forehead. “Even in my own domain, I never thought I’d see the day.”

“I’ve taken on a boy.”

He sneered. “Spare me your personal details.”

“I’ll be overseeing his development for the near future, so expect to see him around the Raging Heaven. I don’t want him pulled into the current schemes.”

The damp cloth stilled, resting against her right cheek.

“What is his name?”

“He calls himself Solus. But his companion calls him Sol.”

Polyzalus glanced back at the arrogant Gadfly. “You’re tempting the Fates, boy.”

Socrates scoffed, amused. “Three decades difference aren’t what they used to be. We’re both old men these days - it’s only that I choose to look it.”

“Those children took a bite out of my influence,” Polyzalus explained, because the world was a strange place, and he had known wiser men to be less informed about more obvious things in the past. “They perverted the nature of my shades and used their stolen strength to do the same to my peers. Even if I were to grant them clemency, the others wouldn’t.” Especially when these hungry ravens had thwarted all attempts to bring their lost Heroes in line.

Tyrants were greedy existences. It was already the case that they hungered beyond any satiation. Anything that strove to take even more from them would face the same fate regardless of whose heels they were nipping at. What else could a starving lion do when provoked by a scavenger?

“What makes you think that the boys I’m referring to are the same ones tearing down your crows?” Socrates pressed, with his veiled curiosity. He reached out with his poisonous logos, as if Polyzalus couldn’t see it written in the stars between them.

“I don’t think. I know.”

He watched with a dim sort of mirth as the logos strengthened, coiled in on itself in preparation. And then he waved his influence through it, brushing it off like sand from his shoulder, and headed off the argument before it could be made.

“You can run your circles all you want in the agora, but not here. Not right now. And especially not in front of my wife.” Three times he asserted himself within his domain, and three times it was made so.

He dipped his cloth into the shimmering basin once more, and returned to his duty. In the fine feather bed, his wife continued to sleep her dreamless sleep.

“I came here intending to be civil,” Socrates said, scowling now, and reached into a fold in logic disguised as cloth, pulling from it a jug of fine kykeon. The smell of it permeated Polyzalus’ domain, and he knew it was no coincidence that this was the exact blend he had served a young man in search of understanding over four hundred years ago. Back when he ruled in the Scarlet City.

Back when the setting sun belonged to him.

“How can a scholar be anything less than civil in the presence of a king?” Polyzalus mused. “But so be it. I’ll humor you - where do you intend to keep this boy?”

“It just so happens that an estate has been made vacant recently,” Socrates said, shrugging and taking a pull from the wine jug himself. He swallowed easily, savoring the taste.

Then he grimaced in fleeting unease as Polyzalus burnt Courage from his soul.

“What?”

“I gave the boy a place to learn some sense away from prying eyes - and the presumptions of men that think they know best.”

The damp cloth burnt to ash in his hands, and the ash burnt soon after. Outside of the bedroom, to the furthest edges of his domain, members of the Burning Dusk cult faction within Olympia dropped anything and everything they were doing and moved. Whether that was to rush towards them or away depended on the individual.

Of course, he’d seen Socrates bring the boy to the kyrios’ estate in the heart of Kaukoso Mons. It wasn’t an act outside of the Gadfly’s usual privileges, confidant that he had been to the late lord of the Raging Heaven Cult. But refuge for the night was one thing, and prolonged accommodation was entirely another. “You intend to keep him there? In the heart of the mountain where the Oracles sleep? With my daughter?”

He had promised murder when the Gadfly first walked in, and countless times before today. Perhaps after all these years he’d finally make good on that promise.

Socrates raised both hands, with some effort, against his ethos. And he spoke. “I brought no ravens to your doorstep, I can promise you that. Only a boy with more potential than sense. Your daughter is as she’s always been. Safe and secure.”

“And why should I take you at your word? Why should I accept a young fool’s resolve over my own?”

Socrates matched logos to ethos, as he always had, and the sight was as absurd as it had been the very first time.

“Because you’re all balancing on the knife’s edge, and even a young fool’s word could be the difference that places one of you above the rest. And unlike your peers, who are each trying to decide which path best suits their greed, you don’t have a choice.”

Socrates spread his hands and offered up the truth of Polyzalus’ world as he understood it.

“The others can decide. They can go home and reclaim what was theirs before the kyrios took them from it, or they can stay and fight for what the kyrios left behind. But not you, ‘Zalus. The only way out for you is through. Nothing remains of you in the Scarlet City. No one is waiting for you there.”

No one but Damon Aetos.

Rage warped the sunset domain for a single micro instant. In the time it took him to reclaim himself, every soul in the Burning Dusk wing of the Raging Heaven Cult dropped to the ground, their eyes and ears leaking blood. The only one spared was his wife. As always, courage wrapped her in its tight embrace.

“The world is on the brink of being a violent place once again,” he finally said, the tightly leashed fury in his voice cracking the marble beneath their feet. “I won’t tolerate another threat to my ethos.”

“I’ll keep them in line,” Socrates promised. Them. So he sought to include the other hungry raven in his protection. Polyzalus stared him down, stared through him, sifted through the light of his soul and didn’t find a single answer that satisfied him.

“You said you’d never take on another student,” he finally said, reaching into empty air and grasping the jug of wine that Socrates had brought in offering. He drank deeply from it, remembering simpler times. “What changed?”

Socrates sighed.

“Nothing at all.”

Polyzalus finished the wine in two more pulls and dismissed the jug from his domain. He turned away from the philosopher, back to his wife.

“Swear to me they won’t take another bite out of my influence, and know that if either of them advances on my daughter I’ll tear their mortal threads from the loom and eat their beating hearts.”

“I swear. And I understand.”

Polyzalus waved an irritated hand. “Fine. Do what you will.”

The Gadfly always did.

1.40

The Son of Rome

“Tell me, Solus, what do Romans do for fun?” Selene asked, resting on her stomach in the late kyrios‘ bed while I paced slowly around the room. Her legs kicked idly behind her. We had been speaking for hours while I waited for Sorea to return with news of Griffon’s survival.

The Scarlet Oracle was borderline ravenous for tales of life outside of the Half-Step City. She eagerly listened to my description of the city of Rome as a Roman knew it, chiming in to contrast it with what she had been told of the Republic as a Greek. She didn’t hesitate to point out similarities between her own city and mine when she noticed them, and was even quicker to ask about differences in our ways of life.

I’d had an idea from the start, when we first spoke to each other on that plateau - surrounded by initiates of the Raging Heaven Cult and yet entirely alone - that she was an isolated girl. I had assumed that had more to do with her father than anything else, but then I’d found out she was an Oracle. It was impossible not to see once I knew to look for it. Selene was a girl that no common mystiko could hope to approach, even for a casual conversation. Those that could afford to be in her company were, by the nature of their power and influence, far older and far less agreeable than a girl her age needed in a friend.

The more we spoke, the more I found myself sharing the truly painful memories. The ones that stung like fresh wounds, because they were small enough that I could afford to not remember them every day. The thousand-thousand little things that made me proud to call myself Roman. The countless shards of a shining, shimmering mosaic that together made up the Republic.

Selene accepted those small remembrances, all but meaningless to someone who hadn’t lived them, with genuine reverence. And that made it all too easy to keep divulging them to her.

What did Romans do for fun? I pondered the question.

“Games,” I said, because it was the first thing that came to mind. “The chariot races were the largest spectacle by far. My father would always reserve the best seats at the corners of the track, where the races were the deadliest. It was considered a dull affair if at least three chariots didn’t crash by the final lap.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed racing to be Rome’s favorite pastime,” Selene said, interested.

I glanced wryly back at her, bracing half my weight on the raven’s bronze spear. “Why do you say that?”

“Well…” She tucked a finger behind her golden veil and lifted it just enough for a single scarlet eye to peer back at me. Her Heroic fire burned mischievously. “I’ve only met one Roman so far, and you seem to fall in line with the common consensus.”

“I enjoy games as much as the next man,” I protested. “In fact, I enjoy them more.” She smiled obligingly and let the veil drop.

“I believe you, Solus. I’m just surprised. I would have expected a more violent game, if nothing else.”

“It was permitted for chariot riders to whip their opponents,” I admitted.

Her smile deepened. “I see.”

“Regardless,” I said, waving the point off. “The simple things are always enjoyable. A hot bath and a cold bath, an afternoon at the races or a game of dice with friends, and whatever sport happened to be at hand.”

“What was your favorite game when you lived there?” She asked, tilting her head. Then, rising up slightly, she added, “is it a game we could play here?”

I still had my knuckles, and I suspected that the late kyrios would have all manner of board games and curiosities here in his estate, if what Griffon had told me of the man was true. But the question had been what my favorite game was.

“My favorite game was Lusus Troiae,” I said, and shook my head. “It’s not something two people can play.”

“The Game of Troy,” she murmured, disappointed and curious in equal measure. “How was it played?”

“Officially? The Lusus Troiae is a maneuvering game, a communal test of skill rather than a competitive one.” I paused in my pacing, allowed the distant cadence I had been keeping in the back of my mind to fade, and sighed heavily as the throbbing ache in my left leg came roaring back to the surface of my thoughts. “In honor of victory, in respect for a statesman’s passing, or in commemoration of new holy ground, the games were invoked as a remembrance of the present as well as the most distant past - the origin war that birthed the Republic.”

“A communal test of skill,” Selene mused. “What’s it look like?”

I inhaled deeply, tasted the clatter of equestrian steps and the drumbeat of their flawless formations.

The column split apart

As files in the three squadrons all in line

Turned away, cantering left and right; recalled

They wheeled and dipped their lances for a charge.

“Three squadrons of mounted Cavalry, each fifteen strong,” I recounted, closing my eyes and seeing it unfold. “Twelve riders, two armor-bearers, and a leader to guide them. Forty-five men and their warhorses in total. We call it the Game of Troy because what they were doing was more than just a drill.” I smiled, because the wonder was still there. Even the memory was dazzling.

They entered then on parades and counter-parades,

The two detachments, matched in the arena,

Winding in and out of one another,

And whipped into sham cavalry skirmishes

By baring backs in flight, then whirling round

With leveled points, then patching up a truce

And riding side by side.

“They went to war amongst themselves, those forty-five men. They brought the Battle of Troy to life without spilling a drop of blood,” I recounted. “During my time as a young patrician in Rome, and later as a young officer in Gaius’ legions, I had seen the Lusus Troiae in motion more than once. Each occurrence was as profound as the one that came before. It never got old. It’s difficult enough to coordinate forty-five men in such a complex formation. On horseback, in front of the most demanding audiences in the Republic? Incredible doesn’t do it justice.”

“It sounds impressive,” Selene agreed. “But not the sort of thing you can play at a moment's notice. How often did you get to do it?”

I chuckled ruefully. “Never. I was always an observer.”

I wasn’t old enough, back when I skulked the streets of Rome. And after, I had never had the time.

“Your favorite game is one you never played?” Selene asked, frowning severely. “That isn’t fair at all. It’s also very sad!”’

“I said that was the official Lusus Troiae,” I corrected her. “And it is one of my favorites to this day, observer or not. But as a boy my favorite was the unofficial Game of Troy. The one that young patricians and street rats alike would play while the adults were away.”

“Oh?” She leaned forward, eager.

“Sometime after I met Aristotle,” I explained, “the pickpocket that led to our meeting introduced me to the child’s Lusus Troiae.”

For a moment, the aches and pains were a fond thing, a memory of long afternoons in the alleys and streets of Rome. I shook my head.

“We formed teams of children, one always larger than the other, and where the adults chose to recreate the war in its finest form, capturing the essence of martial ingenuity without any of the bloodshed, the boys of Rome chose to do the opposite. We would draw a line in the dirt and the larger team would do everything in its power to drag the smaller team across that line. Tactics were minimal, if they were there at all. Bloodshed and broken bones were common occurrences.”

Selene hummed, tilting her head. “I think I can guess which of the two teams you preferred to be on.”

“To prevail in the face of overwhelming numbers,” I mused. “That is the essence of Rome.”

“How do you win as the smaller team? Drag the larger team across the line?”

“No, the official game of Troy is an ode to coordination, but the boys’ game is the opposite. The only way to win was to be the last man standing on your side of the line.”

“And how often did you win, Solus?” The Scarlet Oracle asked me. I glanced back at her, smiling faintly.

“Every time.”

We continued on like that, trading stories long into the night while I awaited the return of Socrates or my eagle, whichever came first.

It ended up being the latter, to Selene‘s delight and my quiet relief. The messenger eagle alighted on the raised butt of my spear, vomiting a message as well as a pile of ink black crow bones into my open hand. Idly, while I unfurled the papyrus and began to read, I cracked a bone open with my teeth and sucked the marrow out. The starlight strength rushed through the new channels in my body, cascading down towards my left leg and burning horrifically as it began its bloody work. It wasn’t an immediate fix, but any help was welcome.

“Solus,” Selene said, and I glanced up to find her rising from the bed, veiled face tilted down towards the remaining bones in my hand. “What are those?”

I tossed one to her, and she juggled it between both hands as if it burned.

“Griffon and I believe them to be a fraction of a Tyrant’s influence,” I explained, spitting the fragments of bone out onto the kyrios’ priceless ivory and gold floor when I was done with them, moving out into the temple courtyard. “They taste vile and burn going down, but they’re better than hard tack.”

The Scarlet Oracle considered the midnight bone in her hand for a moment before slipping it into a fold in her Oracle attire. She sighed softly and shook her head. “You’re not going to live a very long life if you keep on like this, Solus.”

That was divine wisdom if I had ever heard it.

Sol,

As always, it’s a pleasure to hear your voice, even when I’m only imagining it. If I’m being honest, I might even prefer the you that exists within me.

You’ll be pleased to know that I took your great-grandmaster’s lesson to heart, and have since advanced to the second rank of the Sophic Realm. Please, deliver to Socrates my thanks when you get the chance. A bolt of tribulation lightning should convey my gratitude quite well, I think. Failing that, you may instead inform the great philosopher that he’s an ugly son of a bitch and I intend to punch him in the throat when next we meet.

I await your company along with our heroic friends, whose strength I have long admired. Perhaps while your great-grandmaster is revealing to you the secrets of creation, I might be able to learn a thing or two from these great legends. Assuming they can find the courage in their hearts to face the tyrant known as reality.

Learn quickly and hurry back, worthless Roman master.

Always,

Griffon

I read the message delivered by my virtuous beast, and then I read it again out loud for Selene’s benefit. She was giggling by the end of it, and I couldn’t deny a bit of exasperated mirth myself.

“This Griffon is your companion that Socrates spoke of?” She asked, and I nodded. “I take it he isn’t really your student.”

I shrugged. “We grew up in different worlds. I’m not strong enough to stand over him as a mentor, and neither is he to me, but there are some domains where I am the master.”

“And some where he is in turn,” she finished. I nodded. “I think I’d like to meet him. No, I know I would.”

I considered the attire of the Scarlet Oracle, the sunrise silks of dawn. “I think he would feel the same way.”

I folded up the missive and dropped it into my shadow, consumed the rest of the ink black bones and internalized their starlight marrow, and tightened my grip on the raven’s bronze spear.

I began to hum another cadence under my breath, walking along the ivory and gold path, and after a moment Selene joined in. For the first time since we had arrived on the shores, paradoxical as it was to think while crippled and held captive, I relaxed. Tension slipped away and purpose took its place. Things hadn’t gone the way that I’d intended, but that was a fact of life I had grown all too accustomed with over the years.

What mattered was that I had found a mentor, and I could begin moving forward towards what Griffon had dubbed my hopelessly grim future. My relentless companion was alive and well, stronger than ever. For the moment, I could shrug off the weight that Olympia had heaped upon my shoulders.

Of course, the legions had taught me early on that such moments rarely lasted.

Sorea noticed the intruder first, shrieking an alarm and fanning his wings out wide in a threatening stance, still perched atop my spear. Selene was by my side in an instant, a spear of her own suddenly in her hand, its shaft a bone white yew topped by a bronze head, the entire weapon covered in carved depictions of war and tragedy. Her sunray silks whispered quietly as they fell to the floor, revealing the ornate bronze armor she had been wearing underneath.

I inhaled a wary breath and drew myself up to my full height, forcing my left leg to take my weight. I set aside pain and infirmity, things that an officer had no time for, and faced the archway with severe bearing.

“Come forth,” I demanded, and miraculously enough, someone did.

Scythas stepped out of the open air, already three steps inside of the late kyrios’ courtyard, and dropped his sword to the mosaic floor. It clattered musically, every jarring impact somehow turning to whistling chimes on their way to my ear.

“Solus,” he said hoarsely, and I saw the bags under his eyes. The hazel flames of his heart flickered fitfully, their gold embers dulled to copper. I recognized the look on his face immediately.

It was the kind of exhaustion that sleep couldn’t fix.

The hero of the Howling Wind Cult dropped to one knee, gritting his teeth. He bowed his head shamefully.

“They told me to kill you,” he confessed. “I wasn’t brave enough to tell them no. But how can I kill you, after you stood by my side? After you were strong for me when I was weak?”

Selene inhaled a slow breath beside me, easing forward a step. She reached out a slender hand, slowly, and laid it upon the crown of Scythas’ head. He didn’t react when she did, other than to shiver and grit his teeth.

“Beware, cultivator,” she said quietly, with sad sympathy. Before my eyes, the curious and vibrant girl I had been introduced to dimmed and became something deeper. “Your heart is not your own.”

“Tell me it isn’t true, Solus,” he begged without meeting my eyes. “Tell me you aren’t striking out against the elders. Tell me you aren’t the raven that hungers.”

Slowly, with care not to betray my pains, I knelt before the Hero of scything wind.

“That night, I wasn’t the one that took the first step,” I reminded him. Not cruelly. With no particular heat. But he flinched nonetheless, dark brown curls of hair matted with sweat hanging over his eyes. “I only made you aware of injustice in action. I only followed where you led.”

“I didn’t want to hunt,” he protested. “I only wanted to save Jason. I only wanted to save someone, for once.”

I frowned and glanced up, into the sunlight veil of the Scarlet Oracle. I tilted my head back, towards her personal quarters within the kyrios’ estate. Her lips pursed. After a long moment, she inclined her head in a nod.

“Why are you here, Scythas?”

“I told you. The Tyrant Aleuas wants you dead -”

“Not here in this courtyard,” I said. “Why are you here in this city? What is a hero doing in the most secure city in the world while there are people out there in need of saving? Monsters in need of slaying?”

When he refused to answer, or was unable to, I gave him my best guess. I voiced the trend that I had noticed among all of our companions. The red thread that connected us all.

“You ran away,” I quietly condemned him. Scythas nodded miserably. “You wanted to save someone, to be yourself again. I can respect that. I can even admire it. But it isn’t enough to be that man once. You have to be him every day, every hour, every single moment. You can’t afford to be less when the world needs you to be more.”

He looked up at me, and there were tears in his eyes.

“How can I be?” He asked, tortured. “How can I possibly be a hero now, when I had the audacity to be a coward when I was needed? When I had to be brave?”

Just like Jason before, I looked into the mirror’s reflection and felt rage at what it showed me. I set my jaw and rose on worthless legs, thrusting out a hand. Scythas stared at it like it was a living serpent.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” I told him harshly. Those broken eyes snapped up to mine. Belatedly, I felt Selene‘s hand on my back, steadying me. Always another person’s hand holding me up. Always another soul standing beside me in support, helping me do what I should have been able to do for myself.

“The question you should be asking yourself - how can you be anything else?”

Scythas stared up at me, and I saw him teetering on the edge of giving in to despair.

“What do they have on you?” I asked him. The First Spear of the Fifth had told me once that the men didn’t need to think you were soft to confide in you. They didn’t need to be comforted or consoled. It was enough to know that you’d go to war for them. It was enough to know that you’d tear out throats for those in your care.

“I’m engaged to his daughter.”

Ah.

“You care for her,” I said. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t have to. “What else?”

His pneuma rippled and flexed around him. “My brother. They have my brother. They took him into the Howling Wind Cult, into the kyrios’ own confidence. They’ve taken my brother, and every day they strive to turn him against me. They took my family, Solus.”

“So kill me.”

He met my eyes in despair.

“You have two choices,” I told him, crushing the part of myself that urged me towards empathy. “You can obey, now and tomorrow and the day after that, and pray every day for a Tyrant’s mercy. You can do what they tell you and kill me where I stand. It might even be enough to keep the people you care about safe.

“Or.”

I clenched my outstretched hand into a fist, and pulled him to his feet with Gravitas.

“You can stand,” I said fiercely. “You can fight. And you can take back what is yours. You can’t live both lives, so which will it be? Will you be a slave? Or will you be Scythas? What does your heart say?”

He stood under his own power. Haltingly, he reached out to me.

“It says I’m lost,” Scythas whispered.

“Take heart, cultivator,” Selene said. “You may be lost.”

I took his hand and gripped it tight.

“But you are not alone.”

1.39

The Young Griffon

The second rank of the Sophic Realm felt much like the first.

The difference was enormous by the standards of a Civic cultivator, of course. My reservoir of pneuma - the sea of my vital soul - had deepened an outrageous amount. The saying went that one rank above was worth ten below, and though my perceptions were skewed by excessive blood loss and a staggering depletion of strength, that felt nearly in line with what I had experienced.

I had also grown in a less evident way, something I couldn’t quite pin down, but which instinctively felt clearer within me. I had a few ideas as to what it could be, but at the moment I was in no state to be waxing theoretical about Sophic cultivation.

Instead, I chose to pay my wayward friends a visit and assure them of my good health. Alas, I misjudged my new strength, and rather than open the door to Elissa’s residence I accidentally conjured thirty hands of pankration intent and tore it off its hinges.

There in the hall I found Elissa and the rest of the group, as I had suspected I would, along with a pleasant surprise.

“Lefteris,” I said brightly, flashing my teeth in a friendly smile at the gold-string archer. “I’ve been looking for you.” For some reason, he flinched at my words - or maybe it was just the sight of me.

I noted a pair of boys peering out at me from behind Lefteris’ legs, each of them around Myron’s age by the looks of it. Their fiery red hair was mostly covered up by straw hats, but the bright, mismatched eyes were on full display. I’d ask about them later when I wasn’t feeling quite as murderous.

“Griffon,” Elissa breathed. “You’re alive.”

“I am,” I agreed, stepping inside and grinding the door to further splinters beneath my heels. My pankration hands flexed and grasped fitfully at the air around me, crackling still with the memory of lightning. They clawed at the walls around them, they pounded against the floor and they wrenched the door apart. Others still reached out for the Heroic cultivators at the other end of the hall. The heroes eyed them warily, pneuma curling around themselves protectively.

“Forgive me,” I said, grabbing a pankration arm with my flesh and blood hand and crushing it into formless essence. “These hands of mine are versatile, but at their core they’re nothing more than a manifestation of my intent.”

“And that intent would be?” Jason asked cautiously, his hands resting at his waist, where several daggers were sheathed.

I grinned.

“Violence.”

The rosy light of dawn erupted upon the remaining twenty-nine hands of pankration intent in the hall, that curious weight I had noticed upon my advancement flickering in their palms.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elissa scoffed, breaking from the ranks and crossing the hall. She tensed as she passed through the throngs of grasping pankration hands, but none of them touched her, naturally. “You look like you already have a foot in the Styx.”

“Two, actually,” I said, smiling faintly when she snorted in amusement.

“And I suppose you expect us to pull you out? Patch you up and ship you back out good as new, is that it?” She poked me in the chest, relaxing into the back and forth. “You’ll be replacing that door. And don’t even think about-”

“Why is the coward touching me?” I asked curiously. The Sword Song froze, staring hard at me.

“Excuse me?”

“I asked why you were touching me,” I repeated for her benefit, “with the mongrel finger you refused to lift when you were needed.”

“Be very careful about the next word you say,” she said, every syllable a threat. I leaned in close enough for the residual lightning in my hair to shock her.

“Coward.”

The Sword Song spat an oath and lunged forward, only to be jerked back in the same motion by Kyno, who hoisted her up with her back against his chest while she thrashed and seethed.

“Who gave you the right!? Who gave you the right to ignore the reality of this city, to render judgment on us who have lived it!? How dare you call me a coward, you arrogant scarlet bastard!”

“Ho, have I touched a nerve?” I taunted her, advancing forward while Kyno stepped back with her in his grip. “Does it anger you, to be confronted? Does it upset you, to face judgement from someone who isn’t broken and defeated?”

“What were we supposed to do against the Gadfly?” she spat, flames the color of desert heat blazing behind her eyes. The heat in her face overpowered the classical beauty of an advanced cultivator, allowing the scars to assert themselves in all their ugly glory. “What could we have possibly done to stop the man that plumbs the depths?”

“What could a group of Heroes do against a single Philosopher? Is that what you’re asking?” I repeated the question, continuing forward even as Kyno bumped back against Lefteris and Jason. I saw something like true steel enter the archer’s bearing, just for a moment, as my wandering pankration hands reached for the two boys hiding behind him. His influence struck out and nailed them to the floor in a wordless invocation of will that sent lances of silver pain through my soul. Good. Good. Give me something.

“Not a philosopher. The philosopher. He set the standard, we named it the Scholar’s path after him. Crows and bleeding carion, you can’t possibly think it’s that simple.” Elissa jerked against Kyno’s grip, but unlike at the funeral he decided against letting her go. She snarled in frustration.  “Socrates has had centuries to walk his path, further than any of his kind. How long have we had? How long have you had?”

“Eighteen years.”

The cultivators in the hall stared at me in flat disbelief. Anastasia tilted her head, furthest down, merely leaning in the doorframe to the next room and watching. I shot her a challenging look. She smiled apologetically.

“Eighteen years old,” Jason muttered. “Even for Solus’ student, that’s…”

“Lying again.” Elissa’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t ask you how old your disguise was. I asked you how old you were. Griffon, the Olympic competitor.”

“And I answered you,” I said, pushing them back into the adjoined room. There were several lounges around the edges, and a warm hearth with a few crumbling logs burning away inside. A table next to two of the lounges had several empty jugs on it, one still half-filled with kykeon. It seemed they’d had a long day of sitting around, drinking and feeling sorry for themselves.

“Still with this? Even now?” She demanded. “We threw in with you against all reason, but you still won’t tell us the truth.”

“That’s twice you’ve called me a liar. My virtuous heart won’t tolerate a third.” My pankration hands strained to the limits of the range that I allowed them, clawing at the air in strangling motions. Elissa’s pneuma rose in response.

“Be reasonable, both of you,” Kyno said firmly, holding the Sword Song still with an arm around her throat and holding the other out towards me, palm flat. “She makes a good point, Griffon. How can you expect us to see this through if we continue to hide everything significant from one another? The stakes in this game are too high to be playing against each other on the side.”

“And why would I ever entrust my secrets to this cabal of cowards?”

Kyno met my eyes and did not waver. “We aren’t you. The Oracle was right when she judged you. You say all the things a man in your position must not say, you do all of the things that you must not do, and as far as I can tell, you are the way you are for the thrill alone. Most men aren’t made in your image. And if you want to work with us, you’re going to have to live with that.”

We stared hard at one another while I bled out on the Heroine’s floor. Finally, I tilted my head.

“That day, before we went to see yours, you told me to seek the Scarlet Oracle,” I said. He nodded. “When was the last time you saw her, or knew someone to have seen her?”

The heroes exchanged looks.

“Recently,” Kyno said at length. “Why?”

“During my brief stroll through the Storm That Never Ceases,” I said, drawing my pankration hands back within myself with some effort, “I spoke with each of the Oracles.”

“You… what?” Jason asked. Anastasia hummed in interest.

“Seven in all,” I continued, “but when I reached the eighth, the oracle of my own home, I found her broken and battered in a crater of melted stone. Can any of you explain that?” By this point Elissa had stopped raging, a pensive frown settling onto her face, and Kyno slowly lowered her to the floor.

Anastasia spoke for the first time since I’d arrived. “That’s a question you’d have to ask her successor. Or your master, perhaps.”

“Of course.” I rolled my eyes and turned, striding back down the hall.

“Wait!”

“You’re leaving in that state?”

“Absolutely not.”

I glanced down at the marble white hand gripping me by the elbow and holding me in place. On my best day, a Heroine’s strength was something I couldn’t have shaken. As I was now? I may as well have tried to pull heaven and earth along with her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked Anastasia. If the body was weak, then presence would prevail in its place.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t phased. Caustic green eyes burned as they roved up and down my body, and with a distasteful click of her tongue she pulled me back into the room. I allowed her to do it, because my only other option was to resist and fail. She sat me down on one of the lounges next to the table and I grabbed the remaining jug of spirit wine and downed it in protest.

“‘What do I think I’m doing’, he asks,” Anastasia muttered, shaking her head in disbelief. With deft movements, she wound her hair into a simple braid and shrugged out of her fine onyx robes, leaving her in a simple peplos that fell to her midriff. “As if I’d let you walk out of here in that state just so you can die. Solus would never forgive me.”

I opened my mouth to say something appropriately harsh and shut it just as quickly as she laid her hands upon my chest, searing heat sweeping through my body. I jerked back, but she only leaned forward, guiding that heat through the vital channels of my body where the Rein-Holder’s marrow dwelled.

So, this was purity.

“You’re a healer,” I mused, tracing her pneuma as it wound through me, burning away the impurities that it found and cauterizing internal wounds that my rosy hands of dawn hadn’t been able to reach.

“That’s one of the things that I am,” she agreed, her usual conniving smile replaced with focus and intent. In this moment, more than any other that had come before, I bore witness to the Heroine that was Anastasia.

“Teach me,” I said.

The heroine blinked, her pneuma faltering in my veins, and glanced up at me.

“Medicine isn’t something that can be learned overnight. It’s not some fighting stance to add to your inventory after a few days practice.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll master it all the same.”

“Why?” Jason asked, sitting on the couch opposite the table and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, visibly forcing himself to lean closer to Anastasia so he could watch her work. “You never struck me as the type. You break, you don’t build.”

“I am whatever I desire to be,” I said. “As for why, this morning has made it clear that I can’t rely on others to mend me when things are dire. If I had known how to do it myself, I wouldn’t have had to turn back at the precipice of the peak.”

“The peak of the mountain?” Elissa cut in.

“He threw you that far?” Kyno asked.

“No,” Lefteris answered for me, frowning my way. “Based on the trajectory, you couldn’t have landed more than a third of the way into the storm.”

“That’s true.” I acknowledged. “My great-great-grand-master didn’t have the courtesy to send me all the way up, so I had to travel the rest on foot.”

“You went up the mountain?” Elissa hissed. “Alone?”

“Not alone. I made some friends along the way.”

“When the Raging Heaven sends initiates up into the storm for their rites, they send all of the cult’s senior mystikos to guard them,” Kyno said with a grave sort of wonder. “There are things in that storm too treacherous for a single cultivator to walk alone.”

“The hounds aren’t so bad.” I lifted my left shoulder in a shrug, because the right had stopped functioning hours ago. “Any dog can be disciplined.”

“You’re serious,” Lefteris said. He looked from me to Elissa to Kyno. “He’s serious?”

“This is what we were talking about,” Kyno said wearily, rubbing at his temples. “So, you braved the trial of tribulation. Official or not, that earns you a right to admittance to the Raging Heaven Cult.”

“I didn’t make it to the top,” I pointed out.

“That just means you wouldn’t be inducted as a senior initiate on your first day,” Elissa said.

“The higher an initiate makes it up the mountain before breaking or being broken by the storm,” Jason explained, “the higher their standing when they first enter the cult. It’s a point of pride, as well as their peers’ first look at what they’re made of.”

And I hadn’t made it all the way. How annoying.

I sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to make up for it when I return with Sol.” A beat of uncomfortable silence, punctuated by the crackling hearth.

“Solus… we can’t be sure that he’ll be coming back,” Kyno finally said.

“And why is that?” I asked mildly.

“Look at yourself,” Elissa said, gesturing at my admittedly gruesome appearance. By now, she seemed almost too tired to be angry with me. “The Gadfly goes where he wants and says what he wants, and the tyrants of this world allow it, where they would subjugate any other philosopher. Solus may be beyond us, but he certainly is not beyond Socrates.”

Anastasia frowned, but didn’t look up from her work. Jason spoke for her, seeming just as troubled.

“It’s not impossible,” he said, gripping the upholstered edge of his couch. “Together, under the right circumstances, if we could find him. I owe it to him to at least try. I made a promise that I’d stand by his side.”

“And you broke it in under a day,” I said, manifesting two pankration hands to clap. “Impressive.” He scowled and looked away.

“Enough,” said Anastasia, digging fingertips painted black into the juncture between my ribs. I exhaled slowly as an enduring pain in my chest was burned away. “We hesitated, and that was our weakness. It won’t happen the next time.”

“This is madness,” said Lefteris. Sitting beside him, the two boys and their straw hats were staring at me with open curiosity. I stuck my bloody tongue out at them, and they both flinched. “I won’t be a part of it,” he insisted, beseeching Kyno and Elissa. “And you two shouldn’t either. More likely than not we’d be going after a dead man, challenging the Gadfly over a corpse. We might as well go charging straight into Tartarus and save ourselves the detour.”

The beating of wings sounded from outside the door, cutting the archer off before he could get a full head of steam. Elissa cursed.

“The door.”

But what swept through her entryway wasn’t an ink black crow, rather a great messenger eagle. Sorea glided into the room, his wings brushing either side of the hall, and settled himself on the back of my couch with an expectant trill. Lefteris inhaled sharply, recognizing the bird, while his boys stared in wonder. Anastasia, for her part, immediately ceased healing me in her delight.

That delight died a quick death when the messenger eagle disdained her reaching hand, beating his wings and shrieking in her face. She drew back, hurt.

“The bird is wise,” I said, holding out a palm. Sorea snapped his beak and heaved, vomiting a handful of black bones as well as a roll of papyrus into my hand. I inclined my head in thanks and opened the message, something primal easing in my chest as I saw Sol’s tight, militant script.

I read two lines before I was smiling.

“What does it say?” Jason demanded, leaning over as far as he could to see. I went back to the beginning and read it for the room to hear.

“Griffon,

I hope this letter finds you in one piece. You’ve been due a smack in the mouth, but I won’t be able to enjoy it until I know you’ve survived to be reminded of it. Sorea will wait for you to send back a reply, so don’t keep him long after you’ve read this.

I can’t rejoin you just yet, but I’ll be fine where I am. I came to this city looking for Aristotle, but his master’s master will do just as well. Socrates has identified an aspect of my cultivation in need of improvement, so while he advises me I’ll be behind closed doors in the late kyrios’ estate.

Try not to be yourself until I get back. You can tell the others I’m alive, but don’t give them the full details. Things have become complicated enough as it is.

Ever,

Solus

“Ah,” I said, looking from the assembled cultivators’ expressions back to the last paragraph. “I suppose I shouldn’t have read this out loud.”

The room erupted.

1.38 [Lefteris]

The Gold-String Guardian

Names were strange things.

Eleftherios. Lefteris for short. Neither name had been given to him at birth, but his mother had told him from a young age, over and over until he was old enough for the sentiment to stick, that his name was too dangerous for the world to know. That it was a secret between the two of them that had to be kept at all costs.

They moved often, early on. Each place was a new home, and each home meant a new name. It was safer that way, his mother insisted. This way if anyone did find out his true name, they wouldn’t be able to track them through the fake. If every village and every city knew him by a different moniker, they would be safe.

One day, when he was five years old, he asked his mother why she had named him at all, if it was such a burden. It wasn’t the first time he’s seen her cry, but it was the one he remembered most vividly. He’d tried comforting her, blindly, the way that young children did - assuring her of things he had no understanding of and no ability at all to deliver on.

A child’s platitudes always cut deepest. Because unlike with an adult, you knew they believed them wholeheartedly. That they didn’t understand some things were impossible in such an ugly world.

He grew up, eventually, and came to understand the way of things. He took what control of his life that he could, deciding at least that if he had to live under a fake identity that it would be one of his choosing. He chose an audacious name, admittedly, but after a lifetime of hiding he felt he was due some audacity.

Eleftherios. The liberator.

He had grown up, but that didn’t mean he had entirely given up on those ideals. He would do what he could. And when he could, however he could, he would help those who suffered like he had suffered.

Until the day his name caught up to him

“Theri,” the usurper whispered. Another nickname, one that the boy had decided on himself. He was poised on hands and knees at the edge of the cave, peering out as far as he dared. The boy was equal parts curious and wary. “Who is it?”

Lefteris didn’t move, didn’t look back, didn’t even flare his pneuma in wordless response. He didn’t dare to.

Not while the gadfly was watching him.

There were some things that were universal in the free Mediterranean. Stories of people and places that every Greek child, even one such as him, cut their teeth on around crackling fires. Every young boy had shed bitter tears at least once for the tragedy of Heracles, the Champion, cut down in his eleventh labor so unjustly after completing the tenth. Every free citizen knew of the Conqueror and his greed, knew to fear him and to never speak his name directly, because there was no guarantee he wouldn’t hear them say it.

And of course, every academic with a thought in their heads knew of the Scholar and his influence. The man that existed not only in legends, but also in the same modern world that Lefteris had been born to. The man that Tyrants regarded as an unshakable pest. The man that all cultivators considered to be their master’s master, in some distant way. The philosopher that even the Coast couldn’t kill.

Socrates.

Before Lefteris’ disbelieving eyes, that man strode out of a cave not fifty feet away from the safe haven he thought he had established, within leaping distance of the alcove where his charges laid their heads to rest every night. All this time, and he had never once known that they weren’t alone. He had chosen this spot, just beneath the immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven, because proximity to the storm was the only way to escape a Tyrant’s roving eye. And he had been fool enough to think that was enough. To think it made them safe.

Lefteris watched, frozen in horror, as the gadfly picked up the Rosy Dawn’s sly competitor by his golden shawl belt and heaved him into the storm.

Socrates turned his head, then, and looked him dead in the eyes.

Polyhymnia, Lefteris desperately invoked. The muse of sacred poetry immediately pressed her finger to his lips.

Be silent, she whispered in his ear, graver than he’d ever heard her speak, draping her cloak protectively around him as she pressed against his back. And be still.

Lefteris obeyed, as he’d obeyed since he was a boy, bowing his head and hoping for greater men to take no notice of him. For a long, long moment, he thought it was over. That he had been found out, in one way or another, and that the gadfly would surely expose him. That his destiny would come crashing down on top of him and his charges both. Polyhymnia held him steady through it, smoothed out the tension in his body so that he wouldn’t move in even the slightest of degrees.

Then it was over. The gadfly shook his head and muttered something that Lefteris couldn’t hear over his own pounding heart, and walked back into his cave as if nothing had happened. As soon as he stepped into the shadows, he vanished once again from Lefteris’ senses. He had never noticed the Scholar before, because to his pneuma, it was as if that cave didn’t even exist.

Slowly, now, Polyhymnia urged him, her veil brushing against his cheek as she pulled him back towards his own alcove, one slow step at a time. Only when he was fully inside, away from prying eyes, did she remove her finger from his lips and whisper a grave farewell.

Lefteris turned and regarded the usurper, currently fighting against a headlock that the vehement protector had put him in.

They were just boys. Young enough that they could almost pass for his sons if not for the fact that they looked entirely different, red-haired and bright-eyed where he was painted in desert shades. The usurper was the younger of the two, slightly shorter than the vehement protector and far more flagrant in his mannerisms. Which was unfortunate, because his real name was by far the more dangerous of the two of them.

“What did I tell you about poking your head out?” Lefteris demanded, before anything else, and the adrenaline pounding through his veins gave heat to the words that he hadn’t intended. Both boys froze, staring up at him. “Well?”

The vehement protector spoke in the usurper’s place, stepping in for him as he always did.

“Be wary without Theri,” The older boy answered, reciting it from memory.

“But you were right there!” The usurper protested, jerking back and forth in the vehement protector’s grip. “I only wanted to see.”

“And you saw,” Lefteris said, kneeling down in front of them, “but you were seen in turn.”

The usurper paled, and his vehement protector shook him by the neck.

“I told you,” the older boy hissed. “I told you to wait. All you have to be is patient.”

Lefteris watched them go back-and-forth, an odd combination of fondness and dread festering in his heart. They had grown so much since he’d taken them on, and their spirits were starting to assert themselves. Their sense of self was solidifying, and they were aching to live their lives. He knew they wanted to walk the earth freely, without fear of being recognized for what they were through no fault of their own. They were growing tired of waiting for a liberator.

Eleftherios. It was a name he wanted to live up to, someday. But that day evidently wasn’t today.

“Both of you, be quiet,” he finally said, looking past them at the modest conditions he’d managed to establish for them since coming to the sanctuary city. Furniture and tools for dining, a few toys and curiosities that he had picked up after months of walking through the markets, and as many tablets and scrolls as he could feasibly smuggle into a cave at the top of a mountain. Which was quite a few.

“Is it time to go?” The usurper asked, watching him as he surveyed their things. Now there was remorse in his mismatched eyes. He knew what that look meant. “I’m sorry, Theri. I didn’t know - I promise, I didn’t mean to be seen.”

Without being told, the vehement protector released the usurper from his chokehold and went over to their section of the cave, gathering their things up with practiced efficiency.

Lefteris sighed, and placed his hand upon the younger boy’s head.

“It’s fine,” he told the boy. “It might be time to go, it might not. I’m not sure yet. For now… for now I need to talk to a few people, and you two are coming with me.”

The vehement protector paused in stuffing a toy sword and its accompanying shield into a large leather sack. “Now?”

Lefteris nodded grimly. “Now.”

§

They took the long path, the boys disguised as casually as they could afford, each wearing a straw farm hat that obscured their defining features from most casual eyes and allowed them to blend in just fine with many of the other children on the outskirts of the city.

They took the long road because Lefteris could no longer be sure that he had been at all successful in hiding them. As they meandered through the city of Olympia, the boys inevitably forgetting the tension of the situation in favor of exploring the markets and engaging with the other children out and about, Lefteris cast out with all of his senses for followers. He didn’t find any, but then, he had never found any before in Olympia, and that hadn’t stopped Socrates from stepping out of that cave within spitting distance of him.

It hadn’t stopped the revenant from Rome.

They walked the city nearly in its entirety, corner to corner, and passed through the agora several times. The usurper reveled in every moment of it, eager to explore the place that had been in his sights but out of his reach for so many months, and though the vehement protector did his best to stay vigilant, he was still only a boy. After the second pass through the agora, he was enjoying himself just as much as the usurper.

Eventually, morning turned to afternoon. Afternoon turned to evening.

By the time Lefteris had satiated his paranoia and they’d arrived at their destination, the burning embers of dusk were fading from the skies and the moon was ascending to its throne in heaven. They stood before an unassuming door in one of the less renowned residential areas in the city, and he motioned for the boys to be silent. Exhausted by a long day of adventure, they obliged without protest. He raised his hand and rapped it against the wood.

Lefteris only had to knock once before the Sword Song’s door swung open. Elissa stared at him, and he saw his wild eyed paranoia reflected in her.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly, immediately looking down at the two boys hiding behind his legs. “And who are they?”

“They’re with me,” he said simply, leaning in. “I’m here because I saw something outrageous this morning. Have you spoken to those two cultivators from the Rosy Dawn since we met them? From the kyrios’ funeral?”

Her expression changed, and his worst fears were confirmed. He grabbed each of his boys by the shoulder and pushed them inside the Heroine’s home. He slammed the door shut behind him, and Elissa immediately pressed a hand to the wood, closing her eyes and invoking something wordless with her pneuma. When it was done, she turned and stalked down the hall.

The dread he was feeling redoubled as they followed her into the next room, and beheld a full party of Heroic cultivators.

“Lefteris?” Kyno asked, confused, from his place in front of the hearth. He had his crocodile skin laid out across his lap, and he straightened from a hunched, wary posture when they entered the room. “What’s going on?”

Rather than answer immediately, Lefteris found himself staring at the other two cultivators in the room besides Kyno and Elissa. The Hero of the Alabaster Isles and the caustic queen herself. Jason glanced at him through split fingers, his hand splayed over his face while he hung halfway off of a lounging couch. Anastasia didn’t even bother to acknowledge him with a look, leaning against a shuttered window with her eyes closed.

Lefteris knew for a fact that Kyno and Elissa didn’t keep company with those two. He also knew for a fact that they had been there, the night of the funeral. The memory was almost completely black, washed out by foolish amounts of alcohol, but he remembered the club. He remembered the shrieks of eagles and crows, of the weight of command and the revenant that bore it on broad, wrathful shoulders. The man that Jason and Anastasia had been following.

“This must be a joke,” Lefteris said, distantly, as if with another man’s voice. He willed it to be true, stoked his heart’s flame unconsciously to make it so, but such an alteration was beyond him. His expression twisted. “The two of you, with them? Are you out of your fucking minds?”

“‘Left-” Kyno tried again, swinging his crocodile skin over his shoulders and rising, reaching out a hand to him. Lefteris slapped it away, seething. The usurper and the vehement protector both flinched.

“Don’t ‘Left’ me! Look at you! Look at both of you!” He rounded on Elissa, leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed. She scowled. The Sword Song wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What could have possibly possessed you? What could have been so tantalizing that you would throw in with them? With that man? The first time we saw him was after he’d slapped us all in the face and dared us to do something about it, and the second time was with a broken Crow in his hand!”

“Things have happened since then,” Kyno said, holding both arms out placatingly. The vehement protector glanced worriedly between Lefteris and the Heroic Huntsman. A distant part of Lefteris realized that Kyno might have been the largest man the boy had ever seen.

“You weren’t there,” Elissa added, stubborn till the end. “What’s going on now is-”

“Is what? What could be significant enough to throw in with the man making enemies of Tyrants in their own domain? What could possibly be compelling enough to implicate yourselves with stowaways from the Rosy fucking Dawn?”

“Enough of barking dogs,” Anastasia murmured, opening her eyes. Lefteris bared his teeth at her.

“Enough of venomous whores.”

She raised a dark eyebrow, unimpressed.

“Sit down, ‘Left,” Elissa demanded. “You’re scaring your own children.”

He looked down and saw it was true. The usurper and his vehement protector stared up at him, wide-eyed and afraid. Even in their past moments of crises, during the conflicts that had forced them into the Half-Step City, he’d never spoken like this in front of them. He’d thought himself better than that. Lefteris grit his teeth and reached for calm.

Polyhymnia met him halfway, as she always did, and he exhaled slowly.

He sat down and addressed the room. “Tell me why this morning I saw the gadfly throw Griffon into the Storm That Never Ceases.” He took what little satisfaction he could from watching that statement wash through the room. Jason viciously cursed.

And then they told him.

It was a story told in waves, each of the Heroic in Cultivators offering a perspective, an anecdote that the others had not been present for. A side of the revenant and his student that hadn’t been seen that night at the funeral. They took their time, one occasionally chiming in for the other to emphasize a certain detail, and it was clear that they had been telling each other these stories all day. Trying to make sense of what they’d gotten themselves into, and why.

By the end of it, Lefteris was no more satisfied than before. If anything, he was angrier.

“You mean to tell me,” he finally said, once the accounts had been made and a tense, expectant silence had settled over the room like a funeral shroud, “that these two plied you with platitudes and heroic ideals, promised you salvation without explaining how they would deliver it, and in exchange you took up arms against the Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult?”

“You would understand if you had been there, rather than cowering in your cave,” Anastasia said, shrugging his disdain off and delivering her own with a smile.

“Things are worse than we thought they’d be,” Elissa cut in before he could snap. “We knew it would be bad, but not like this. We thought they’d make their picks and be done with it, but it’s been continuous. Every night since the funeral they’ve had their crows out in force.”

“The mystikos are afraid to travel the mountain alone,” Kyno said grimly. “Even those that shouldn’t have anything to fear, those who couldn’t possibly play a significant part in a Tyrant’s power struggle. Children, ‘Left. They travel in packs, even during the day, because it’s the only way they feel safe.”

“And did either of you, even for a moment, stop to wonder if your new friends had something to do with that?” Lefteris didn’t wait for them to answer. Their expressions said enough. “A strange cultivator appears on the night of the kyrios’ funeral and tears a bloody streak through the cult’s night crawlers, accuses a young aristocrat of the Raging Heaven outright of collusion with assassins, and you’re surprised that the aristois are responding?”

“It’s not just because of Solus,” Jason said, shaking his head. He was hanging almost fully off the lounge now, dangling upside down. “They’ve already started moving in on the juniors, drawing lines and shifting the rhetoric in their lectures.”

“If I wanted to hear a coward speak I’d have gone looking for Scythas. Be silent.”

Jason sneered at him upside down, making a vulgar gesture with one hand.

“You said you saw the gadfly with Griffon this morning,” Elissa said, impatient and restless. “When specifically, and where?”

He’d known from the start that their safe haven beneath the storm couldn’t last forever. Still, it hurt to see his boys’ shoulders slump at the question. They knew that once a hideaway was found, it wasn’t used again. The disappointment fed the flames of anger and disgust, pushing him to his feet. He paced in the middle of the room, unable to sit still.

“It was an hour after dawn, maybe less. We were on the eastern side of the mountain, close enough to the storm for a mortal to cast a stone up into it. Griffon came hurtling out of a cave, beaten half to death, and it was the gadfly that came out after him.”

He ran a hand through his hair, pivoting on his heels again and again.

“I just can’t wrap my head around it. I know you two. I know you’re not this foolish,” he told Elissa and Kyno, hating the way they looked back at him. Like they’d been let in on a secret that he had yet to be told. “I listened to you, I heard you out from start to finish, and I still don’t get it! What could possibly be so compelling about these two, to convince you of this madness?”

Kyno sighed heavily, pulling from a fold in his cult attire a leather skin and taking a long pull from it. He offered it to Elissa, who took a longer pull and grimaced at the taste.

“There’s something to them,” Kyno said heavily. “I can’t describe it with words.”

“Does this nameless thing last after death?” Lefteris pressed. “Because if it doesn’t then it’s useless to you now. And here you are, out in the cold. Do you really think the elders will buy your story of being kidnapped? Do you think you’ll be able to sell it beyond a shadow of a doubt when you’re face-to-face? Are you willing to bet your lives on that?”

“They’re not dead,” Anastasia said, and the simple certainty of it made Lefteris briefly see red.

“I saw the Scholar toss Griffon into the storm,” he said with slow deliberation. “Alone and half-gone already. He’s dead.”

“He’s not,” she replied, just as slowly. “No student of Solus would die from something like that.”

“He’s dead!” Lefteris shouted, despite the fact that it made his boys jump in alarm, despite Elissa’s hissed demands for him to be quiet. His pneuma rose, wrathful beyond belief. “He’s dead, and his master isn’t far behind him! Sitting here and assuring yourselves otherwise isn’t going to change that! It isn’t going to make him walk through that door-”

There came a sharp, piercing crunch as the protections on the front door broke. They all stared at one another, frozen in that moment. Lefteris couldn’t feel a single hint of pneuma outside. Then, as one, they rushed into the hall.

A single murky hand of pneuma had punched cleanly through the door, crackling faintly. As Lefteris watched in disbelief, nineteen more punched through to join it.

And then they were joined by ten more, and thirty hands of violent intent tore the reinforced door clear out of its frame.

VS 1.37

The Son of Rome

“Arrogant, belligerent child,” Socrates muttered as he stalked out of the rugged chamber with its shard of tongues. “I’ll box his ears until they fall off. Split foundations. Split foundations!”

For a long moment, I continued to stare at the shifting text chiseled into the man-size tablet, incomprehensible to me with both eyes open. I still felt that primordial shifting behind my eyes, in my skull, even in my tongue. But the bulk of it had slowed down when I stopped reading, and instinct told me that the process was not yet finished.

“My master is a good man,” I said quietly, nearly to myself. Beside me, Selene gripped the arm I had over her shoulder.

“I believe you, Solus.”

“He did the best that he could with the materials he was given, and the time that he had.” I had said it before to Griffon, and then to Socrates. “That I am what I am is not a condemnation of him. My failings are my own.”

“But you credit him with your successes, don’t you?” Selene gently prodded me. I glanced sidelong at her. At some point, she had lifted her golden veil from her face, revealing fine features, burning scarlet eyes and hair like spun gold.

“It isn’t the same,” I said.

“Why isn’t it?” Socrates called, his irritated voice drifting in from the adjacent chamber. “What differs?”

I gripped my spear and forced myself to stand, my thoughts far too tangled to keep on reading with any real focus. Selene quickly stood up with me, bearing the brunt of my weight with nothing but an encouraging huff. I sighed softly and let her do it, the two of us turning and limping out of the untarnished room.

“In the legions, accountability is king,” I said flatly, watching as Socrates rifled through one of the late Kyrios’ sleeping chambers. “It isn’t within a mentor’s power to live my life for me. Aristotle provided me with the tools that I needed to succeed, and so I credit a part of all my successes to him.”

“And why not your failures?” Socrates asked, overturning several large, woven reed baskets onto a feather bed covered in silk sheets of indigo and white. Clothing spilled out, tunics and sashes, dress robes for cult business, as well as formal attire for mortal affairs.

“Why should I?” I bit back. “Say that a farmer gives me a scythe and tells me to harvest a crop by sundown, and I return to him with only half the work done because I decided to do it with my hands instead. Is it his fault or mine?”

“Yours, surely enough,” Socrates agreed. “But what about a huntsman?”

“What about a huntsman?”

“A scythe’s function is self-evident when you’re standing in a wheat field at harvest- that’s clear enough. But what about the workings of a bow and arrow? If a hunter presents you with a bow and a quiver and tells you to bag him a fine buck by sundown, is it his fault or yours when you return empty-handed?”

“Mine.”

“Is that so? The man that knows how to track deer, how to stalk them without being spotted, and how - as well as where - to shoot them. That man presents you with a bow and some arrows and a stern demand, and you believe that it’s your fault for not living up to his expectation? And if you do, somehow, by the grace of god manage to bring something down through your own ingenuity, he deserves a portion of the credit for the kill?”

Socrates held up a tunic of white cloth with crimson arch designs sewn along its edges. He looked between it and me, squinting. I glared back at him.

“The comparison isn’t fair.”

Socrates threw the tunic at my face. Selene caught it just before it could hit me, and the sound of it striking her palm left me confident that it would have knocked me clean off my feet if it had hit.

“In all three scenarios, each of the masters provided their student with the tools needed to succeed,” he said, but waved a hand to brush the argument away from him. “But fine, we’ll discard the huntsman. What of the fisherman?”

I unwound my arm from Selene’s shoulder, ignoring her protest, and leaned heavily onto the celestial bronze spear I had stolen from the temple of the father. I considered the scenario.

“What’s provided?” I asked, finally. Without a set of the parameters, I knew he could wind me into a knot until the end of time.

“A net and a spear,” he said, holding a broad leather belt in his hand, considering me before grunting and tossing it back into a basket.

I exhaled, annoyed. “Fishing isn’t that hard. Acquiring the tools is more difficult than learning how to use them.”

“I know men that would disagree, but let’s say you’re right. If I gave you a net right now and told you to take that pretty spear of yours and catch me dinner, how many fish could I expect from you by sundown?”

I thought hard about it. Fishing had been a curiosity when I was a boy, a non-issue when I was a soldier in the legions. There was always someone else to do that work. Always more important things to be done. But my time at the Rosy Dawn had humbled me in many ways, and re-introduced me to many tasks I hadn’t practiced since my father had taught them to me. Fishing was one such task.

So, I considered the time of day, the distance from here to Olympia‘s port city, and nodded sharply.

“Thirty.”

“Good.” Socrates reached into a fold in his tunic, and inexplicably, pulled from it an entire fishing net. He tossed it at my chest with only slightly less force than he had thrown the tunic. “Come back with one hundred by sundown.”

I staggered back a step as the net hit my chest, but managed to keep my feet. I pretended not to notice the way that Selene hovered behind me, her hands just barely not touching my back. I stared hard at the master of my master’s master, temper boiling.

“I can’t catch one hundred by sundown,” I said quietly.

“I can,” Socrates said, turning away from the Kyrios’ clothes and moving on to the pots and jars scattered about, perched on high tables and shelves. Each of them was painstakingly painted with images of epics, comedies, tragedies, and more benign depictions of everyday life and nature. He reached into one and pulled out several rolls of bandage cloth, flinging them negligently over his shoulder. Selene leaned past me and caught them all in one hand.

“I can’t,” I repeated.

“What does that matter? It’s possible, because I can do it, and all I would need are the tools I’m giving you. A net, a spear, and a long afternoon. Why can’t you bring me one hundred fish, boy?”

“I never said I couldn’t bring you one hundred fish,” I corrected him, eyes narrow. “I said I couldn’t catch them.”

“Ho? Will you buy them, then? Steal them, perhaps?”

I shrugged. “You gave me a spear and a net,” I said wryly. Selene chuckled softly behind me.

“That I did, that I did. So, in summation, without the accompanying experience, the tools alone are not enough to accomplish the task before you. Leaving you no choice but to cheat or steal your way to success.”

Selene laid gentle hands on my shoulders, and I realized that they were horribly tense, my pneuma rising precipitously. I forced myself to relax, to be realistic with the state of my body and the strength of my enemy, and allowed the Scarlet Oracle to guide me down into a nearby chair.

“Life is not something that can be summed up in a single neat scenario,” I said tiredly. Socrates laughed.

“Exactly right. What Aristotle did to you is not equal to the huntsman nor the fisherman. It is worse. Do you know why it is that cultivators so often die young, despite having the potential to live unfathomably long lives?”

I did.

“The ideal of cultivation is to begin at the foot of the mountain and end at the peak,” I said, brushing off Selene when she went to touch my wounded leg and taking the roll of bandage cloth from her hand. “The experience of cultivation, on the other hand, is the reverse.”

“Beginning at the peak?” The girl in the sun ray silks asked, curious. I nodded.

“Cultivation is a chariot teetering on the peak of a mountain. Once it starts rolling, there’s no stopping it until it hits the bottom.”

“In pieces, or otherwise,” Socrates mused. I grunted in agreement. “A greater understanding than most men your age have. But that only means you have more reason to see my meaning.”

I kept my silence, peeling back bloodsoaked cloth from my left leg and going to work with the bandages provided. It was stubborn of me. It was prideful. But it was who I was.

“A person’s failings don’t invalidate their virtues,” Selene said quietly, kneeling beside me.

My shoulders slumped, pressed down by the weight of three thousand dead men.

Salt and ash.

“Of course they do.”

“Aristotle may not have been the one to place you in that chariot,” Socrates said. “He may not have even been the one to push you down the mountain. But he changed your trajectory, and he split your wheels. When you take upon yourself the mantle of mentor to another, you’re to blame for a portion of everything that follows. The good and the ill.”

The great philosopher shook his head, emptying out the last clay jar in the room and sighing in disgust at what he found.

“Greedy old dog,” he muttered.

“What are you looking for?” Selena asked. “I may be able to help.”

“Can’t find what isn’t here,” he said. “The late lord decided to take all of the advantages he could with himto heaven. Or Tartarus, as it turned out. His stores of nectar and ambrosia are all gone. It’ll be the long road to recovery for you, boy.”

I looked down at the bandages wrapped tight around my left thigh, already staining red. The hand that I had broken in catching a punch for Griffon throbbed incessantly, something distant but inescapable. The rest of my body felt like one all encompassing bruise.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Good, because you have some work ahead of you. You’ve made a mess of things, and I won’t be cleaning it up for you.” Socrates pulled a handful of cloths from the pile and began wrapping them haphazardly around himself, constructing his veil of inconsequence before our eyes. “You’ll stay here for the time being.”

I reached for anger, I reached for rage. All I found was bone deep exhaustion. “First you beat me like a dog, and now you cage me like one, too.”

“It’s safe inside this cage,” he said, turning and stepping through the next door, out into the underground courtyard with its ivory and gold mosaic floor. “You’ve been snapping at lions’ heels. If I hadn’t stepped in when I did, you and your friend both would have been dead before the changing of the seasons. You might still be.”

“What do I do here, then? Twirl my thumbs and await your pleasure? I have to speak to the others. If nothing else, I can save you the trouble of them coming after you.”

Socrates scoffed, not even bothering to look back. “Not everyone in this city is as uninformed as you. Even fewer are as flagrant. I have nothing to fear from a handful of lost souls.”

“Griffon will come for you,” I said with rock solid certainty. “At least let me speak to him.”

“You’re free to speak to whoever you like,” he said, turning just before stepping through the archway leading back out of the mountain. “So long as you don’t leave this place.” And then he was gone, moving without particular haste up the steps. Eventually, even the sound of his footsteps faded.

I sighed and leaned back in my chair, letting my head loll.

“I can carry a message for you, Solus,” Selene offered with mingled hesitance and excitement.

In lieu of a response, I pursed my lips and whistled a sharp, clarion call. It echoed in the vast courtyard outside the room, reverberating throughout the mountain. I inhaled deeply the scent of cypress smoke and waited, ignoring my aches and pains with long practice.

Only when I heard the beating of wings did I finally tilt my head, meeting Selene‘s curious gaze.

“He forbade me from leaving, but he didn’t say anything about my bird.”

I found my lips curling, just the slightest bit, as the girl’s face lit up and she turned to welcome Sorea as the messenger bird of prey came swooping down into the bowels of the mountain.

I would need to find some papyrus and ink, but it would be enough to send the others a letter for now. Once I shook off the worst of my injuries, I'd find Griffon and we would regroup. I had what felt like a thousand things to tell him, and instinct told me that he would have just as much to say when he came down from the Storm That Never Ceased.

That he would return alive wasn’t even a question. Socrates had allowed it as a possibility, and if it was possible, Griffon would see it done.

“Selene,” I said, lifting my head with some effort and watching her croon to Sorea as the great eagle shuffled around on the floor, surveying the Kyrios’ estate.

The girl in the sunray silks looked back at me, eyes burning merrily. “Yes, Solus?”

“Do you want to hear a story?”

Her smile was dazzling.

1.36

The Young Griffon

What is the nature of tribulation?

Back when I had leapt from the top of the eastern mountain range with Sol at my side, in the throes of my ascension to the Sophic Realm, I had experienced a moment of perfect weightlessness, freedom in the truest sense. And then, when reality had asserted itself - as it always did - my stomach had risen up into my throat, a giddy and exhilarating sensation in its own way. It was enough to put a smile on my face whenever I thought back on it.

When Socrates threw me at the sun, my breath was slammed out of me as if the sky itself had punched me in the gut. I spun madly, without control, the world little more than a revolving blur of mountain and city and skies above. Then, I reached the storm and plunged into the wrathful crown of the Raging Heaven Cult.

At once, I was drenched from head to toe. The clouds were shockingly cold and alive with dancing threads of lightning, spreading like grasping hands through the moisture in the air. I struggled to right myself, twisting and throwing out my arms. I had just begun to regain control when I saw the face of the mountain rushing forward to greet me.

[Dawn shines forth with rosy fingers.]

Twenty arms of pankration intent struck out, some grasping me and others reaching out for the mountain’s jutting ridges. The same way that I had helped my younger cousins learn how to flip and contort their bodies in the air as children, by tossing them up and guiding them back down with steady hands, my pankration intent did the same for me. I flipped myself, bleeding off as much momentum as I could by bouncing back-and-forth between the hands of my own intent, and then I hit the mountain, tucking my shoulders and rolling until everything came to a stop.

Panting harshly and nearly vibrating with adrenaline, I rose up into a crouch and assessed my situation.

I was somewhere inside of the immortal storm that hung around the peak of Kaukoso Mons, that much was obvious. How far up I was, how close to the hidden peak, I had no idea. But I was far enough up that I noticed the effort when I inhaled. It wasn’t just that the air was frigidly cold. It was also thin, more so than it had ever been at the top of the eastern mountain range back home. The mountain itself didn’t seem to be much different up here, but immersed in the clouds as I was, I could only see a few feet in front of my face. Even with the light of dawn in my twenty-two palms. The only way I could truly gauge distance was by watching the-

Lightning struck beside me, close enough to electrify the fine hairs on my arms and make my teeth buzz in my mouth. I rolled sideways, watching another searing lance strike the stone where I had just been.

I tried to curse the old philosopher that had thrown me up here, but instead coughed up a mouthful of blood.

I rolled away from another thread of lightning, hacking blood as I went.

Well. This seemed appropriate.

§

As it turned out, the storm was aptly named.

“Whimpering Heaven,” I growled regardless, the taste of my own blood thick on my tongue. The stone was slick this far up the mountain, treacherous. What paths that existed were even more so.

I leaned sharply back, lightning arcing past my face and striking an outcrop of stone. As it passed, though, thin trailing fingers split off and grasped the tip of my nose. My teeth slammed together, muscles locking up as the lightning coursed through me. I exhaled a seething breath, and just barely managed to wrench back control of myself from the storm.

But there were paths. And that suggested something that I had suspected, but never known for certain. I raced down the path as fast as I dared to, crouching low as I went. I had tried jumping only once. It had nearly killed me, just like that. The skies weren’t safe. Not even for a moment.

Heaven was my enemy.

But returning to the paths. It was simply the case that the mystery cults of the free Mediterranean hoarded their confounding questions at all costs. The mystery of a cult was its founding myth, the thesis statement upon which the entire institution was built. These treasures were hoarded from the public, from outsiders, and even from the cult’s own initiates outside of significant occasions. It was not within the power of a Rosy Dawn mystiko to gaze upon the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god whenever the urge struck them.

It was simple enough to guard that corpse, of course. After all, it was buried in the heart of a vast mountain range. But not all cults were as the Rosy dawn. Not all mysteries were buried beneath spans and spans of ancient rock.

How did one guard a mystery with no natural barriers? How did one obscure from view something in plain sight? Out in the open air? Every cult had its own initiation rites, governed by a unique set of rules and regulations. But the purpose of those rites was always the same.

Of course, I could have been wrong. The Raging Heaven’s mystery could have been buried somewhere deep within the mountain. It could have been somewhere else entirely, separate from Kaukoso Mons. Or, perhaps, the Raging Heaven was as unique in this regard as it was in every other. Perhaps there was no mystery at all.

But as I watched another bolt of lightning arc down from wrathful Heaven and abruptly diverge, striking the upraised hand of a cowering stone giant, I began to doubt.

I slid down slick stone until I was crouched beneath the cowering giant. Light flashed - once, twice, three and then four times. The storm hammered relentlessly down on the statue of a long dead monster, and I felt the fury behind it.

I stayed there for a long while, staring up as Heaven came down, safe from the storm only because I was crouched in the shadow of something that it hated far more than me.

“Porphyrion,” I murmured to the monument of the twice-disgraced Giant. “Look at you. Greatest of the great striders, king of those that shake the earth. Isn’t that what they called you? How can you bear to see your likeness chiseled by such a disrespectful hand? Why can’t I hear your soul howling in outrage all the way from bleak Tartarus? They made you look like a coward.”

Heaven screamed and struck the destitute king of Giants, over and over again.

I looked down the mountain. I still couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I had no way of knowing how far I was from the storm’s edge. I had no way of knowing what Socrates was doing to my brother, now that I wasn’t there to stand beside him. The Fates and Muses knew that our Heroic companions would not stand there in my place.

I looked back up at poor Porphyrion. While he cowered and held a helpless hand up against heaven, his other hand hung worthless beside him. In that hand, insult of insults, the statue’s maker had placed a sword. Never to be properly wielded. Never to be brought to bear. Forever held back in hesitation and fear while its wielder flinched beneath the storm.

No. Not forever.

Pankration hands gripped the Giant’s clenched fist, flaring with the rosy light of dawn and prying apart his fingers. Ancient stone cracked and shattered, and a sword longer than I was tall fell into my waiting arms. I heaved it up onto one shoulder. Its edge was far too dull to cut me.

“Let’s see what Heaven has to say when the damned strike it back,” I said fiercely, and charged out from under the Giant’s silhouette.

I felt the lightning come, a vibration in the air that I could taste on my tongue. I dug my heels in and stopped as abruptly as I had started, pivoted, and slammed the Giant’s blade into the mountain.

I let go and watched the lightning veer sideways at the last moment and strike the pommel of the giant’s sword, rather than me. I waited a second longer than I knew, instinctively, that I needed to, and then I heaved it out of the stone.

“Is that all?” I taunted the fates, pounding pankration fists against the ground as I stood tall.

There came a low, rolling growl, like the thunder that preceded lightning. I turned my head, and beheld a hound of pure, shocking light prowling up the path towards me.

“Heel,” I commanded the storm hound. It barked in response, the sound like a thunderclap.

I turned and sprinted back up the mountain.

§

Time passed. I knew, because my rosy palms grew progressively dimmer as the morning turned to afternoon. Or perhaps that was my own internal sundial sabotaging me. Certainly, there was no way to tell by sight alone. The storm was thick, oppressive, and utterly unrelenting.

I found more hounds.

The distinction between a virtuous beast and a typical animal was similar to the difference between a cultivator and a mortal man, but not quite the same. Beasts could not cultivate in the same manner as thinking men, and so what they did was not entirely equitable. But it was close enough. Once semantics were stripped away, it became a question of magnitude for both man and monster.

That was the common consensus. That was what my mentors had taught me. But Sol had claimed that his demon dogs had cultivated in the style of men. And though I had dismissed him out of hand at first, I couldn’t so readily deny what was now before my eyes.

Hounds could grasp at primitive virtue, given the time, the opportunity, and the primordial strength of will. But no dog could grasp lightning in its teeth. No hound could cast off its flesh and blood and exchange them for the storm.

Tribulation hounds stalked me up the mountain, and with the appearance of each one, I was forced to question what I had always known to be the truth.

I planted the Giant king’s blade in the mountain and rolled sideways. A thunderclap bark was the only warning I got before the hound lunged. Light flashed and the giant’s blade rang like a bell, followed by a yelp that sizzled in the air.

They moved more like the lightning they were composed of than the dogs they had taken the form of. They crouched, and they prowled, that was true enough. They went through the motions of snapping their jaws and lunging like hunters. But the motion that was meant to bridge the gap between crouching and sinking their crackling teeth into prey happened faster than the eye could track. One moment there, the next, gone.

I had been clipped by lightning three times before the first hound had found me. I hadn’t allowed anything to touch me since. I knew in my virtuous heart that the fourth strike would be justice rendered. If one of these dogs got their teeth in me, I wouldn’t be getting them out.

I spotted another looming silhouette up ahead, and wrenched free the giant’s blade with hands of manifested pneuma while I rushed up to it.

I also found more of the condemned.

I lunged and rolled beneath another statue as Heaven struck down, my heart hammering a frenetic beat in my chest as the lightning slammed into the hunched shoulders of a struggling stone man.

“Isn’t it sad, Sisyphus?” I asked the degraded tyrant. He didn’t respond, preoccupied as he was heaving against the boulder that was his perpetual punishment. And also, perhaps, because he was made of stone.

I gripped the blade buried in his stone back and wrenched it free, passing it off to a pankration hand and adding it to my growing collection. Seven stolen blades, and one Giant’s broadsword, were my weapons against the storm. Periodically, as the lightning struck and I had no sorry victim to shelter in the shadow of, my pankration hands would offer their blades up to heaven and dispel the moment before they struck.

Dodging the blades after the lightning blew them out of the sky was a trial, but one I was well-suited to handle. It was far better than the alternative, at any rate.

“Take heart,” I told the statue of Sisyphus, clapping him on the shoulder and squinting up the mountain. “I think we’re nearly at the top.”

Thunderclaps sounded below as well as to my right. Upward it was.

§

Fatigue began to take its toll.

There were many things a cultivator could do without. Sleep, sustenance, even water in the most extreme circumstances. Citizens could put off these necessities for days at a time with the proper conditioning. Philosophers even longer, and Heroes longer than that, until at a certain point a mortal man could be born and die before a Tyrant was forced to break his fast.

But no cultivator could go without air. Even the best of us required a moment to breathe. And as much as it galled me to admit, I was approaching my limits. Skulking around and picking off Crows in the night was one thing. This was another entirely.

I fell more than I slid beneath my latest safe haven, slumping down onto one elbow, precariously close to touching the statue and sharing in its tribulation as lightning struck it over and over again. Twelve pankration hands drove their stolen blades into the stone around me in a circle. I heard barking thunderclaps in the distance. Still closer than I preferred.

Rebuffing them with the blades stunned the hounds long enough to put distance between us, but that was all it did. I had tried cutting one by heaving the blade like a javelin at it, but all I’d gotten for my troubles was a re-creation of what happened when I threw the swords up into the air to intercept lightning bolts. Only, ten feet away from me instead. I hadn’t tried it again.

“It could be worse, I suppose,” I panted. I flashed blood stained teeth and glanced up at my unwitting protector. “I could be you-”

I blinked, and tilted my head.

The Oracle of the Broken Tide sat upon her holy tripod, the seat and the soothsayer both carved out of the mountain itself. Amethyst wound through her body in place of veins, and the tridents in her eyes glowed with the indigo light of prophecy. She was young in this iteration, the lines of her face changed enough that I wasn’t sure if this was simply the younger version of the woman I’d met with Kyno, or if it was another Oracle entirely.

Either way, she was certainly the Oracle of the Coast. If the eyes hadn’t given her away, her company surely would have.

Over a dozen suffering statues were poised around her, flinching, raging, and grasping ineffectually for the light of the sun. These were men I vaguely recognized. Heroes and Tyrants that the Oracle had cast down with her prophecies throughout history. Great men laid low by the heartless judgment of a holy woman. They formed a cage of sorts around her, their bodies acting as the walls, and their grasping, outstretched arms forming a roof of sorts over her head. And as I watched, lightning came down upon them a dozen times in quick succession. It washed over the cage of men each time, dispersing through their arms and down their bodies before a spark could ever touch the woman within.

The statue of the soothsayer stared gravely down at me, as if its maker had always known I’d be here, now, looking up at this moment. I could hear her laughing voice in my head, clear as day over the storm.

You scarlet sons are all the same.

I scoffed and rose to my feet, looking down upon the amethyst oracle. From this angle, I could see the inscription on her seashell crown.

Melpomene

“I’ve seen you before,” I dismissed her. “Show me your sisters.”

Lightning flashed, forking seven ways. I traced the path of each branch and then favored the oracle and her crown of tragedy with a wild smile.

“My thanks,” I said earnestly, and the fatigue was surely getting worse, because I would swear on my deathbed that I saw the statue wink.

§

I found the oracles one-by-one. It wasn’t how I had originally intended to meet them, true enough, but even a storm like this had its silver linings.

I found the Fuchsia Oracle first, with her crown of risen foam, and beheld the throng of maddened suitors and scorned lovers gathered around her in a perversion of a cage. I looked her in her sultry eyes, admittedly less tempting when cast from stone, and addressed her by the name carved with amethyst into her crown.

“Erato,” I greeted the Oracle of Foúskia. “I’ve come to seek your wisdom. Tell me, what is the nature of tribulation?”

I blinked and dropped each of the swords in my hands to rub the fatigue out of my eyes. When I looked again, her smile was no longer deepening. She was simple stone again. Behind me, I heard the snarling rumble of thunder that preceded attack, and lunged inside the oracle’s cage of statue men.

I watched the tribulation hound strike the cage, and instead of rebounding as all its siblings had when I’d intercepted them with a flying  blade, it yelped and howled as it was wrenched apart by the many linked limbs that made up the bars of the cage. I watched as the hound was spread agonizingly thin across the cage. Until, finally, it dispersed with an ear-splitting crack.

Never let it be said that the young Griffon was ungrateful. I bowed my head to the Oracle with the seafoam crown and pressed a kiss to her forehead. If her smile widened, I was too far gone to contemplate it overmuch.

I moved with greater purpose through the storm, sideways more than up or down now. The hounds added new members to the pack to replace the one I had dispersed, but I managed to stay just a few steps ahead of them all the while. I found the oracle of Nkrí next and traced my fingers across her crown of pewter stars.

“Urania,” I said to her, “What differentiates the light of tribulation from mundane elements?”

My answer came first as a bolt of lightning striking mindlessly, relentlessly, above our heads, dispersed by the cage of those she had disgraced with her soothsaying. Then, my answer came twice as the hounds caught up to me. This time, however, they didn’t lunge blindly into the cage to be dispersed. They paced around it, eyeing me intently.

“Not the answer I would have preferred,” I said wryly, flicking the stone nose of the Pewter Oracle. I knew without a doubt that that nose could not have possibly scrunched up in response. It simply didn’t make sense. And so I dismissed it, and made a break away from the hounds after hurling all of my stolen blades at the pack.

“If tribulation can discern, then it can reason,” I proposed to Clio, the other Oracle of the Coast, with her wrought-iron crown. “And if it can reason, does that mean it can be spirited? Does that mean it can hunger?”

The good Oracle gazed imperiously down her nose at me, and I followed her stone hand as it pointed in an entirely different direction than the one I recalled, at the pack of hounds roving further down the mountain. As I watched, one hound among the dozen raised its crackling head to heaven and howled loud enough to shatter my ear drums. From this distance, I could just barely make out the sparks flaring from the corners of its crackling jaw. Drooling in its hunger.

I spoke to each of the oracles, seven in all, and gleaned from each of them a truth of tribulation. Finally, with unspoken anticipation, I hauled my battered body and my eighteen stolen blades - plus the Giant king’s broadsword - over the ridge that I had seen marked by the branching lightning. I laid eyes on the Scarlet Oracle.

No. That wasn’t true.

I laid eyes on what remained of the Scarlet Oracle.

It was carnage carved from stone. There had been an Oracle perched upon a tripod once, and a stone cage of all the great men and women she had cast down with her divine commandments. They were all shattered and cast out now. A miasma of scorched rock and indigo mist hung in their place now, in the glassed crater of what had once been a monument to holy retribution.

Broken, scattered limbs remained, unmoved by the gale winds of the storm, somehow as timeless as the statues they had once been. I stared down into the fractured eyes of the Oracle’s severed head, broken in three places, and assembled her name from the pieces of her broken sun crown.

“Calliope,” I whispered hoarsely, kneeling beside what remained of her in the crater. I asked of her, “Who did this to you?”

My shadow laid its flickering hand on my shoulders. The raven on the right leaned over my shoulder and whispered the answer into my ear.

“I, your father.”

And it pressed the twentieth blade into my hand.

§

The hounds surrounded me. There were well over a dozen of them now, each of them tall enough at the shoulders to look Myron in the eye. They paced around me in that odd way of theirs, lightning limbs flexing as if to move and then suddenly reappearing several steps away, little more than frenetic flashes of light.

In the end, it was inevitable that they would corner me. After all, no man can escape tribulation.

No man could escape justice.

“Tell me something, cousin,” Nikolas prompted me, either in a memory or just out of sight. I couldn’t be sure which. My head was pounding too hard. My body was aching too fiercely to tell. “What is the first virtue?”

“Justice,” I whispered, because it was what I had been born to say.

Every tribulation hound surrounding me snarled and pounced at once, the whole world turning to blinding light and crashing thunder. Before they had even moved, and as a result just barely in time, my pankration hands drove fifteen of the blades I’d taken from the Raging Heaven‘s immortal victims into the stone around me, while the remaining five were raised horizontally above my head.

Over a dozen hounds struck my iron cage in tandem, and their agonized howls split the earth.

“And what is justice?” Nicolas asked. I felt his hand dig into my hair and ruffle it, but my neck was far too stiff to turn my head and confirm whether that was a memory or something happening here and now. “And don’t give me Uncle Damon’s answer. I want to know what you think.”

Up until this moment, and every time previous, I had done everything in my power to avoid touching my stolen blades in the moments that they were intercepting tribulation lightning. After all, it would surely defeat the purpose of using them if I shared in the experience anyway by holding on, whether with hands of flesh and blood or pankration intent.

But that was when I still had hope of escaping a direct conflict. That was when I could still envision a world in which I came out of this any way but straight through.

And that was before I had my answers.

“Justice is a rising hand,” I declared, and reached back out with twenty hands of pneuma to grasp the pommels of my sword cage while tribulation lightning coursed through it.

Light and heat unlike anything I had ever experienced before shot through my soul. I had compared the damage I took in the past by blocking attacks with my pankration hands to real world injuries, but it had always been metaphor more than material. This time, I doubled over and vomited blood onto the face of the mountain. It sizzled as it left my mouth.

“Justice,” I gagged, “is a punch in the gut.”

I focused on breathing, on the heat of the Rein-Holder’s starlight marrow as it coursed through my scorched and ruined body, mending what it could. I had only touched true tribulation for a fraction of a second, and it had nearly killed me.

But only nearly. And in return, I’d seen it.

The answer to my final question.

“Justice is two clenched fists in return for one,” I said, reaching up and rubbing my face. When I lowered my hands, they were covered in blood. “Stained by scarlet sin.”

“The world doesn’t have to be so brutal, cousin,” Nikolas said sadly. I laughed, the sound hysterical, as a dozen more hounds came prowling up the mountain, circling around the blade bars of my cage. Patiently. Ravenously.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. The wind was howling. Thunder shook the earth. Sleet and freezing rain washed the blood away nearly as fast as I could bleed it. But I was alive.

And I was free.

“Justice is whatever I can reach.”

And I lunged forward, reaching through the cage and grasped lightning. My vision flared white and my blood flash-boiled in my veins. But those were only impressions. Theoretical truths. What should have happened to a man that reached out and caught lightning in his hand.

But I knew now.

“Behold,” I snarled triumphantly at the struggling hound. “Tribulation.”

And I crushed its skull in my fist.

1.35

The Son of Rome

“Bastard,” I snarled. “Vile old wretch. Low life latrine digger. I’ll put you on a cross.”

“I’m sure you will,” Socrates said, unimpressed. My vitriol did not slow his stride a single pace, nor loosen his iron grip on the back of my neck.

We walked in lock step down Kaukoso Mons. Socrates had evidently decided against a repeat performance of our rapid ascent, and with nothing else available I had no choice but to use as a cane the same spear that had crippled my left leg. Above, the immortal storm of the Raging Heaven Cult continued to roar. And Griffon was somewhere up there in it.

“If you’ve killed him, I’ll-”

“Crucify me. Yes, you just said that.”

I lashed out with an elbow but I might as well have been striking the mountain. Socrates didn’t even flinch, just tightened his grip on the back of my neck until darkness crept in around the edges of my vision.

“What’s up there?” I ground out, focusing on the stone-cut steps as we descended. One foot in front of the other. I’d been beaten black and blue, broken and crippled in several places, and Griffon had not fared much better. I had no doubt that he had survived the impact, somehow, but I had no way of knowing what he was contending with up in the clouds. The peak of Kaukoso Mons was entirely closed off from sight by the eternal storm, a pillar of wrath that rose all the way up to heaven.

“What do you think, boy?” Socrates asked. After a bit of silence, he shook me by the neck like a stray dog. “That wasn’t rhetorical.”

I thought back to the first time I had ascended these steps with Anastasia. What she had told me about the Raging Heaven and its perpetual storm.

“The members of the cult call this place a monument to hubris,” I answered, my unease growing. “Which would make the storm a monument to tribulation.”

“Accurate enough,” he said, turning us off onto a winding path that continued down through a series of transplanted grottos. Idly, he grabbed a wild pear from a sagging branch, inexplicably ripe despite the current winter season. He took a bite and chewed noisily, a considering look in his plain brown eyes. “But far from the full picture. You understand the basis of tribulation, yes? Aristotle taught you that much?”

I scowled. “Tribulation is heaven’s punishment for man’s hubris.”

“Go on.”

“When we reach beyond our station, there’s always a greater force to remind us of our place,” I said. “When a man runs out of other men to remind him of his limits, Heaven steps in.”

“Artful, but not the path I was looking to go down.”

“What do you want me to say?” I asked, irritated. “Tribulation Is tribulation. Past a certain point, a cultivator gets struck by lightning every time they advance.”

“Better,” he said, and I scoffed. His hand otherwise occupied guiding me by the neck, the wiseman instead slammed my face against a nearby pear tree, cracking the bark. “Discourse doesn’t have to be an art form at all times. The world is full of wonders enough without trying to fabricate your own from delicate language.”

A Greek suggesting utilitarianism to a Roman. Griffon had rubbed off on me more than I thought.

“You’re saying the Storm That Never Ceases is more than just a storm,” I said. It was an obvious thing, something anyone could guess just by looking at the localized pillar of clouds that never once drifted out of place. But I had to know. I had to be sure of what Griffon was facing.

“It is, and it is not,” Socrates said. “What distinguishes lightning from tribulation lightning?”

“Intent.”

“And what makes you think so?”

I gave the question the attention it deserved. I thought back. “Only during moments of ascension have I seen lightning fall from clear blue skies.”

“And that means it never does otherwise?” Socrates pressed. “Do you see everything there is to see, in the past, present, and future?”

I frowned. “No, but-”

“But?”

“But lightning doesn’t strike from a clear sky with no reason. That’s ridiculous.”

“Life is ridiculous, boy. Until we discern the why and the how, the what will always be absurd. A common mistake of cultivators is to draw a line in the sand between acts of nature and acts of cultivation, as if the two are clear and distinct from one another. As if there’s any separation at all. How can you know that this is something unique to tribulation lightning?”

We took another turn, back onto a stone-carved stairway, but these were overlaid by marble without any jewel veins, and they lead into the mountain rather than up or down it.

“You claimed that a philosopher was a man who knew his limits, that he knows nothing at all,” Socrates continued, with an odd sort of disdain. He sighed. “Statements like that are pleasing to the ear, and not necessarily untrue, but they lack substance. Philosophers, in the end, are men that understand there are countless things in this world that we do not know. The field of natural philosophy, then, is a man’s attempt to understand the rules of nature, in as many small degrees as he can before he dies.

“It is easy to prove a man wrong,” The old philosopher said. “What’s hard is proving him right. So I'll ask you again. What distinguishes the light that strikes before thunder from the punishment of heaven?

I inclined my head, grudgingly, and admitted, “I don’t know.”

“Good. An honest answer.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked him, after a beat.

Socrates shrugged. “I’m sure your friend will tell you if he survives.”

“What was the point of that if you didn’t intend to tell me anything?” I asked, frustrated. Socrates glanced sidelong at me.

“I’m trying to see if there’s anything behind your eyes, boy. If you’re not satisfied with the answers you’re getting, ask better questions.”

I bit down on my tongue, stifling my vitriol. I thought hard.

“Has the storm always been here?”

“Nothing has always been anywhere.”

“Was the storm here before the city?” I amended.

He grunted. “No.”

“And what about the cult?”

“What about the cult?”

I scowled, but clarified, “Which came first? The Storm That Never Ceases or the Raging Heaven Cult?”

“The storm.”

My thoughts whirled. The city first, then the storm, then the cult. As Griffon had explained it to me, and as I had seen for myself back in the Scarlet City, the greater mystery cults of the free Mediterranean were established around natural mysteries. Entities, like the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god, that defied all explanation. That could not be understood by mortal minds.

“Is the storm the mystery?” I asked. Socrates inclined his head.

“It is.”

“Then that means it’s a part of the initiation rites,” I guessed.

“It does.”

“So it’s safe,” I pressed, willing it to be true.

Socrates barked a short, ugly laugh. “No, boy. No, it isn’t that at all. Tell me, what do you know of the Raging Heaven Cult?”

“It’s a cult composed of other cults. A nexus for cultivators in the same way that the city of Olympia is a nexus for Greek cultures.”

“True enough,” he said. “I assume, perilous as the act may be, that Aristotle at least touched upon Olympia‘s political significance?”

I nodded, as much as I could with his iron grip on the back of my neck. I had asked him often enough for stories about the Olympic Games, after all. “It’s called the sanctuary city because no matter what conflict plagues the Mediterranean, each of her cities set aside their struggles to come together and compete in the games. Every four years, from the moment the olympic flame is lit until the champion is crowned, there is peace in the Mediterranean.”

“For a given definition of peace,” Socrates said. “But yes. The Olympic Games serve as a quad-annual armistice, an opportunity, slim as it may be, for unreasonable men to experience a moment of clarity. The city of Olympia, as the host of the games, has taken on a sanctuary status as a result. Regardless of the alliances and feuds between the city states, Olympia remains a neutral entity. Because if nothing else, it needs to be standing for us to enjoy our games. And that is something even the most hated enemies can agree upon.”

“All the world for bread and circus,” I murmured, recognizing the sentiment for what it was. It was almost nostalgic, the reminder of my days before the legions, before Aristotle even. When all that really mattered was who won the chariot races that day.

“Some things are the same no matter where you go,” Socrates agreed. “Now, in the same way that the city and its games serve as neutral territory, so too does the Raging Heaven Cult. A cultivator’s solution to a cultivator problem.”

My brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” Socrates said, utterly exasperated. “Why do you think I was so furious with the two of you? You have no idea the forces at play here. The Raging Heaven Cult is neutral ground for cultivators, and the greater mystery cults in particular. It is not coincidence that each of the cult’s elders are Tyrants from different city-states. What does that tell you?”

I considered it. The Olympic Games were a miracle of political maneuvering, but they only occurred once every four years and for a short period of time. It was one thing for a man to set aside his grievances for five days. It was entirely another to do so indefinitely. And yet here were the Tyrants of each of the greater mystery cults, coexisting for centuries without any overt conflict between them.

That alone was astounding, but there was something about it that gave me pause. Just before I answered, my teeth clicked together. I went over his question again in my head, examining every word.

It is not coincidence that each of the cult’s elders are Tyrants from different city-states.

Tyrants.

“Cultivation makes us more of who we are,” I murmured. I didn’t know much about the Greek style, but some things were universal. “A Philosopher grows by acting as a philosopher. A Hero grows when accomplishing heroic things.”

“And a Tyrant grows in acts of tyranny,” Socrates finished the thought. He waved his free hand. “Go on.”

“A man doesn’t become a tyrant by mistake, and a cultivator doesn’t make it that far by chance,” I said, frowning. “Why would someone like that accept a position in an institution like this? What is there to conquer in a city dedicated to neutrality?”

“Nothing at all,” Socrates answered. Still, he seemed expectant.

“Then why?” I pressed. “Why are they here if they know it will stifle their cultivation?”

Everything I knew of the Greeks, and their cultivators especially, told me that it didn’t make any sense. Their tyrants were not loyal to their own in the same way that a Roman dictator was loyal to the Republic. They had no concept of hanging up their laurel crowns and returning to their humble estates. The ideal of Cincinnatus did not exist here. So why?

“What is here that’s worth more than their advancement?”

“You’ve made an assumption that you have no basis for,” Socrates said. I looked at him, confused. He elaborated, “You assumed that they came here looking for something. More than that, you assumed that they chose to come here at all.”

My eyes widened.

“It goes against a tyrant’s nature to exist peacefully beside his rivals,” Socrates said with utter contempt, as we reached the bottom of the marble stairway and stepped through an amethyst archway. “But it is perfectly within a tyrant’s nature to break his rivals one by one and gather them beneath him. The elders of the Raging Heaven Cult are not here because they chose to be. They are here because the kyrios went out into the world and broke them, each in turn, and dragged their beaten bodies back to this city.”

We stepped into the late kyrios’ estate, into the heart of Kaukoso Mons.

A facsimile of a courtyard awaited us, a grand cavern with ceilings high enough that it would have been impossible to see them if not for the amethyst veins that ran through the stone, emitting a faint but enduring light. Burning braziers lined the walls and torches jutted out from grand, towering pillars that rose from floor to ceiling. Eight pillars in all, and the torches affixed to each burned with a different colored flame. The place reeked of smoke, though the air was entirely clear.

The walls of the courtyard inside the mountain were cut by a pythagorean’s fine hand, cornered eight times. A massive octagon, and a pillar for each side. The tip of my spear made an odd chiming sound as it came down to support my next step, and when I looked down I saw that the path beneath our feet wasn’t simple stone, but instead a mosaic trail made of ivory and gold shards. It wound ahead of us into the octagonal courtyard, spiraling in the center to create a massive portrait of a man that I didn’t recognize, before branching off eight ways towards each of the eight walls of the courtyard.

Each mosaic path, as it left the ivory and gold center, drifted from those colors into other gemstone shades, until eventually they matched the color of the flame burning upon that side’s pillar.

Each path ended at a ceremonial tripod. At the moment, all of those tripods were empty.

Except for one.

“Solus!”

“Selene?” I asked incredulously, watching her leap off of her tripod and rush towards us.

“You’re hurt!” She exclaimed, stopping just a step away from me and leaning forward, her hands hovering over my most visible wounds. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her golden veil, but now that I knew to look for it I could see the faint glow cast by her scarlet heart flames. It was easy enough to imagine those eyes flickering anxiously across my body.

“He’s fine,” Socrates said gruffly.

“He’s beaten half to death,” Selene countered. “Who did this to him? Where did you find him-” Abruptly, she stopped and drew herself up to her full height. Which wasn’t very tall, admittedly. “Did you do this to him?”

“I did,” Socrates admitted without shame.

“Why?”

“You know why,” he said. He urged me forward, brushing aside the girl in the sun rays silks, though without particular force. She fell in step just behind and beside me, hands flickering out as if to steady me and then returning to her sides. “If this one and his friends are to be believed, you saw firsthand what he’s been doing.”

“That is that and this is this,” she said hotly. I felt a powerful sense of vertigo as the daughter of a Tyrant scolded one of the most powerful men I had ever met. “He can barely walk.”

“He’ll live,” Socrates dismissed. “Or he won’t. It’s not worth complaining about.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked her, finally finding my voice.

Socrates rolled his eyes. “Where did you think the Oracles spent their time when they weren’t in their temples?”

I stopped short, and was promptly dragged off my feet when Socrates did not. The spear went out from under me and I collapsed to the ivory and gold mosaic floor, staring at the young girl that immediately bent to help me up.

“You’re an Oracle?” I asked her, stunned.

Selene bit her lip. “I am.”

A few things suddenly made significantly more sense, and others made even less. Knowing that she was an Oracle, it only took me a moment to realize which Oracle she was. Her sun-stained attire was far from subtle, as was the fact that she had literally hopped off of a scarlet tripod to approach us.

“You’re the Alikoan Oracle?” I said, accepting her hand and allowing myself to be pulled back to my feet. Broken bones twinged and my leg continued to hang worthlessly beneath my body.

“Yes.”

Socrates made an impatient sound, dissatisfied with how quickly I was regaining my balance. Selene ducked under my arm, the one holding my spear cane, and shouldered the weight of my left side. Socrates continued on, and though I heavily considered making a break for it and trying to retrieve Griffon, I could hardly imagine making it to the foot of the steps before I was caught again. I took a painful step forward, and continued on with Selene‘s support.

“I thought Oracles were meant to be crones,” I muttered. Selene dipped her head, and when she answered her voice was sad.

“They are.”

Something else occurred to me, and I glanced around the courtyard, at its eight holy perches. “Those tripods. They’re more than simple stools.”

“Prophecies are delivered from the seat of heaven,” Socrates said idly over his shoulder, walking over the unfamiliar mosaic portrait in the center of the courtyard and continuing straight, following the ivory and gold path.

“But why are they down here?” I asked, confused. “The Oracles have temples outside where they can take visitors. Why would they need them here-”

And I understood.

“Go on, then,” Socrates demanded. “Share your discovery with the room.”

“The kyrios is king in his domain,” I said, the pieces coming together like a grand mosaic in my head. “In a lesser cult, that might mean presiding over Heroes, Philosophers, and Citizens. But here, the kyrios reigns over Tyrants, too.”

A tyrant among tyrants. And a hunger to match.

“He claimed the Oracles for himself,” I said, looking around at the courtyard with new eyes. “He used Alexander’s assault on the free cities as an excuse, and he brought them here. He built a temple in his own estate, and he filled it with every Oracle under the sun. For himself.”

“You begin to see what power the Tyrant of Olympia commands,” Socrates said, coming to a set of ivory doors at the far side of the courtyard and pressing them open. “This is what the elders of the Raging Heaven, each of them a Tyrant in their own domain, is maneuvering to seize for themselves. This is the struggle that you and your idiot friend have so brazenly inserted yourselves into.”

I limped into the next room with Selene‘s help, and beheld the late kyrios’ quarters. Grandiose, yes. Ostentatious, absolutely. They were as different from Damon Aetos’ personal office as was heaven from earth. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to properly appreciate the sight. Socrates had already thrown open another ivory door and stalked further into the bowels of the mountain.

“Where are we going?” I finally asked, unable to remain silent. “And why?”

For all that we had miserably failed, Griffon and I had assaulted the old philosopher with everything we had. Though it hadn’t left any lasting marks, we had struck him. And though he had consigned Griffon to the storm, he’d acknowledged that it was a place he could return from. Socrates hadn’t killed him, and he had yet to kill me. Why, when he was so furious with what we had done?

“I told you already. I know you have ears, boy.”

I have no choice but to make right what he left unfinished.

Socrates threw open another door, the most ostentatious yet, and we entered into an utterly unadorned room.

To call it a room at all was a stretch. Where the rest of the kyrios’ subterranean estate was obviously man-made, painstakingly carved out of the mountain and filled with earthly treasures, this room looked like nothing so much as a small cavern. There were no mosaic floors, no pillars, and the walls were naturally rugged and uneven.

The door shut behind us, and the only light in the room came from the amethyst veins in the walls. Just bright enough, with a cultivator’s enhanced sight, to see what lay at the center of the room.

“Aristotle left you unfinished,” Socrates said, crossing his arms. “And now I’m faced with two options. I can let your fool choices lead you to their natural conclusions, or I can finish your education, and perhaps watch you live long enough to become a virtuous man.”

“What does this have to do with that?” I asked, staring at the stone slab jutting up out of the ground, the only thing in the room with a clean, angular silhouette. It was a tablet the size of a man, and it was covered in chiseled script.

“A virtuous man is a worldly man,” Socrates said. “And a worldly man must speak the language wherever he may be.”

I thought back to the Eos, to Griffon‘s uncanny ability to speak to several men who couldn’t possibly understand his mother tongue, and how easily he had understood them. And I thought of all the cultivators that I had spoken to since arriving at the sanctuary city-

That I had spoken to in Latin.

I knelt, painfully, before the tablet. Selene settled beside me, the glow of her eyes behind her golden veil all the more apparent in the dark room.

“This is how cultivators speak to one another?” I asked. Socrates grunted.

“All languages are united by a singular purpose,” he explained. “To convey, from one soul to another, and to be heard. The sounds may differ, but the intent remains the same. Every culture has a foundational myth, their first story worth telling. Each of those stories is written on this shard of Babylon, and every other shard in kind.”

I stared at the tablet. Without a doubt in my mind, I knew that something like this did not exist in the city of Rome.

“Read it,” Socrates commanded. “And be learned. I refuse to teach a man that only speaks barbarian tongues.”

I traced over the script, each carefully carved line. The stone was covered from edge to edge, three sections neatly separated from one another, each in a different language that changed as I looked at them. The text itself was cleanly carved. Easily discerned, even in the low light.

And yet…

“I can’t.”

“You what?”

I felt Selene tense beside me at the old philosopher’s dangerous tone.

“Do you mean to tell me, boy,” Socrates said with violent intonation, “that Aristotle did not teach you to read?”

“It’s not that,” I said, annoyed and frustrated in equal measure. I could feel the beginning of a headache coming on in addition to all of my other injuries. “It’s… it’s a mess. Like two stories written over top of one another.”

As soon as I verbalized it, I had an idea. I closed my left eye, and abruptly, half of the overlapping text vanished, and I could read the middle section.

Begin our singing with the Heliconian Muses,

Who possess Mount Helicon, high and holy,

And near its violet-stained spring on petal-soft feet,

Dance circling the altar of almighty -------.

“Why did you close your eye?” Socrates demanded, and I looked up, startled.

“I can read it now.”

“With only your right eye?” he pressed, sounding for some reason more agitated than he had at any point since our first encounter outside of the bathhouse.

I looked back at the shard from Babylon and closed my right eye, opening my left.

I sing of arms and of the man who first

Came from the coasts of Troy to Italy

And the Lavinian shores, exiled by fate.

“I see a different story with each eye,” I realized, recognizing both from childhood days. “The Theogony and the Aeneid.”

“Oh,” Selene breathed.

And as I continued to read both, alternately opening one eye and closing the other, I felt something inexplicable and profound winding into me through my eyes, through my skull and down the line of my spine. Something primordial, of the same association as what I had felt while I looked upon the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. Something powerful.

And I was interrupted again, as Socrates slammed a clenched fist against the stone behind him hard enough to shatter it.

“Two stories,” he spat. “Two stories. I’m going to murder that negligent son of three whores.”

“What?” I asked, utterly lost.

“You aren’t meant to see two stories, boy. These tablets show you your culture’s founding myth. What you see on that stone is a reflection of what you are. It’s a marker of your culture. And you see Greece and Rome.”

He struck the wall again. I coughed at the overpowering taste of smoke.

“Your foundation isn’t just unfinished,” Socrates said with mounting wrath.

Selene finished his thought, utterly fascinated.

“It’s split in two.”

1.34

The Young Griffon

When I was seven years old I called upon Nikolas to face me in the marble octagon. He was exactly twice my age at that time, and his cultivation was exactly one realm above my own.

A Citizen of the fifth rank, challenging a Philosopher of the fifth rank. It was utterly absurd, and everyone involved had known it. Nikolas’ peers and his followers had laughed and urged him up. It was all a game to them, of course, a play fight between the elder and junior pillars of the Rosy Dawn. The gymnasiarch, a famously no-nonsense man, had evidently felt the same way, because he’d allowed it.

But when Nikolas gave in to the heckling and climbed up onto that marble stage, when he met my eyes and we clasped forearms, I knew he saw the truth of it. And though he asked me in a private whisper if I was sure, he did not hesitate to oblige me.

There was a reason I admired my cousin.

When the gymnasiarch gave the call to fight, my cousin came at me with the full force of everything he had as a cultivator, and I met him with the same force in turn. It was over in seconds.

I lost horribly, of course. The gymnasiarch was furious, and even Nicolas’ companions within the cult weren’t sure what face to show him. It was understandable. After all, my elder cousin had never treated them with the same ferocity that he had served me in those few brutal seconds.

But it was exactly what I’d needed. In that moment, as my face struck the edge of the marble octagon and two of my teeth were knocked into the back of my throat, as my right elbow loudly broke, I saw for the first time the difference between heaven and earth. And I knew, without a doubt in my heart, that it was not an impossible gap to bridge.

I never fought my elder cousin seriously again. There was no reason to. I knew myself and I knew him well enough to understand that I wasn’t ready, and before long my father bundled him up on a ship and sent him out into the world, leaving me to take on the role of young aristocrat in its full scope. But that was fine. I had gotten what I wanted.

The greatest men knew their limits better than anyone else.

The vagrant philosopher raised one hand against me, three fingers tucked in and two pointing up to heaven. A lecturer’s pose, as he prepared to educate me on the vast distance between us once more. Unfortunately for him, Romans make for horribly impolite students. Sol surged up from the ground behind the philosopher and tackled him, a furious grimace on his face made utterly vicious by his broken nose.

I struck the old man like a falling star, hammering his face with twenty blazing hands and using the instability that Sol had provided for me to knock him off his feet.

Gravitas hit me like a tidal wave, and this time I allowed it to wash me away in its current, flying backwards as if I was falling out of the sky. The philosopher’s counterpoint, something wordless and unseen, reached out for Sol in my place. I disdained that with twenty pankration hands, dragging my brother after me.

The entrance to the cave collapsed in on itself before we could make it fully out, an unfortunate coincidence I was sure. Gravitas struck the falling stone but was somehow dispersed, leaving us trapped inside. I planted my feet and pulled Sol up to stand beside me.

The vagrant philosopher snorted, annoyed, and brushed off his tunic as he stood. Without looking I reached over and gripped Sol’s nose, setting it back properly with a nauseating crunch. He cursed, and at the same time gripped a finger of mine that I hadn’t noticed dislocating and popped it back into place. Silver threads of lightning sensation shot up my hand, and we were good as new.

“Let’s try this again, old man,” I said gaily, shifting into a proper pankration stance. Fists loosely clenched in front of me, the majority of my weight braced on my launching foot. “My name is Griffon and this is Sol. Who do you think you are to lay your ragged hands on my brother?”

He appeared unimpressed, but he answered. “My name is Socrates. I am who I am.”

When I was seven years old, my elder cousin taught me what it was like to fight an opponent that I could not possibly overcome. I never forgot that lesson. And here, now, I reaped the bitter rewards of it.

With our companions it might have been possible. But alone?

Oh well. I hadn’t asked for it to be easy.

“Let’s exchange discourse,” I proposed.

“If we must.”

The three of us exploded into motion.

“I’ve asked the Roman already, but I’ll ask it again. What is it that you think you’re accomplishing here?” Socrates asked, parrying my opening combination with short, efficient chops and blocks. He turned sideways as Sol lunged past me with his bronze spear, avoiding it by a whisper.

“Here?” I caught a straight left punch with five pankration hands overlaid on one another, and swallowed back blood at the shockwave impact it sent through my soul. “I’m reminding an old man that experience is no substitute for vigor.”

“More deflection,” he said, catching a flurry of punches on raised forearms, protecting his temples and the sensitive juncture between his jaw and his neck. We each raised a knee at the same time, bone slammed against bone, and I winced as something in me cracked.

Sol struck out with the butt of the spear, catching Socrates in his kidney and forcing him back a step. The philosopher took the spear in the exchange and Sol didn’t fight him for it, instead adopting his own loose, roughshod boxing stance.

“Deflection,” Socrates said again, scornfully. He tucked the bronze spear - inexplicably, all ten feet of it - into a fold in his tunic and crossed his arms. “Doublespeak, half truths, and implication. You progressed to the second realm and think that people calling you Philosophers makes it true.”

Socrates tilted his head as if to urge us out the door, and in the eddies of his influence I felt the bare flicker of something crucial, something profound. I would have missed it entirely if I hadn’t been looking directly for it already.

I blinked, startled, as Sol reached both hands under my arms and pulled me bodily to my feet. At some point, somehow, I had been driven to my knees.

Lights flickered along the walls of the cave despite the lack of any readily seen source. Shadows danced across the stone, resolving themselves into vague shapes that I couldn’t quite decipher. Socrates advanced forward a step.

“All too often,” he said, “young men mistake sophistry for sophisticated thought. It is not enough to be convincing.”

And then he was abruptly gone. I frowned, wary, and glanced around. Sol did the same beside me, casting out with his riptide influence in search of the vagrant philosopher.

“It is not enough to win the argument,” an old man said, walking up to us.

“Not now, grandfather,” I said, waving a distracted hand as I ran the incorporeal fingers of my violent intent across the walls of the cave, searching for a crack or a crevice, something the philosopher could have escaped through.

Wait.

Sol shook it off a moment before I did, reaching across my body to catch an uppercut that would have lifted me cleanly off my feet. I saw the tightly controlled agony in his face, heard the crack of his hand breaking. Socrates leaned back and kicked him into the far wall for his troubles.

“You see? Distraction is not enough,” Socrates said. “Whether in a fight or a conversation. You need fundamentals.” I inhaled sharply and closed to engage. I sought to enhance myself with the principles of my soul, but he countered each and every one as I invoked them, just as he had outside the bathhouse.

What remained was pure technique, and the conditioning of our bodies. Fundamental qualities.

“What is rhetoric if not the art of convincing others?” I countered, with words and with clenched fists. “A philosopher is above all else a wise man. And I say that a wise man knows what he wants. I say that a wise man knows the value of his time! Why shouldn’t I use the tools at my disposal to get what I want?”

I landed a blow to his ribs and took two on the chin for my troubles, but Sol came rushing in before I could be fully put down. He swung with quick and ugly intent. I could perfectly imagine him in a camp filled with rowdy soldiers, brawling and knocking out fellow legionnaires to blow off steam.

“A wise man knows what he wants,” Socrates repeated. “And yet when I ask you what you’re here to accomplish, you play glib and dance around it. What are you here for, boy?”

“I’m here for a challenge,” I said, and my heart sang the truth of it.

“Looking for a challenge, or looking to be challenged?”

I smirked faintly and whipped my body around with my right heel as the pivot point, striking at his temple with a roundhouse kick. The philosopher caught it by the ankle and slapped me across the face.

“Word games,” he scolded me. “Life isn’t a competition to see who can layer more meaning into a single phrase. Give me clarity.”

Sol latched onto the arm holding my leg and drove his shoulder up into Socrates‘ chest, pivoting and attempting to pull him over. Gravitas rocked the cave, scattering the shadow silhouettes on the walls and reforming them into orderly ranks. Toy soldiers marching across the stone.

Whether it was because of proximity or negligence on the philosopher’s part, Sol’s virtue was able to reach him this time. Briefly. The philosopher fell up, into the air, and then slammed down as Sol’s virtue spun the axes of the world. Sol brought him back down to earth with punishing force.

“Speaking with clarity,” my brother mused, leaping back from the philosopher’s formless retaliation and escaping the brunt of it, only grimacing as something struck his right shoulder with an audible clap.

“Something like that would surely deviate his cultivation.”

I looked sharply at him, and he found it in himself to smirk.

“My virtuous heart can’t lie.”

“That’s my principal,” I said, betrayed.

“Ah, true.”

“This is a game to you, is it?” Socrates said, addressing Sol as he rose once more. It didn’t escape my notice that he looked no worse for wear then he had back at the bathhouse. By contrast Sol and I were bruised and bleeding, broken in several places. “Your city is a smoking ruin and here you are, in another place on the brink of a similar fate. It’s funny to you, is that it?”

What small joy my brother had found tucked away in his heart vanished from his face. I scowled.

“I’m here for a challenge, and I’m here to be challenged,” I said, striding forward and flexing my pneuma. “I’m here to see the Oracles, and I’m here to compete in the Olympic Games. I’m here to meet interesting people, powerful people, and match myself against them. I’m here to learn all of the secrets that you and your Tyrants don’t want me to know.”

“Is that all?” Socrates asked. Thick gray eyebrows furrowed as he regarded me. “You’re too young to be this greedy.”

I grinned fiercely. “I am who I am. And I want it all.”

And then I waved my hand, as if to brush a drifting ember from the air.

“It’s in his pneuma,” the shadow that was the raven on the left whispered to my shadow that was the raven on the right, while the cultivator that was Sol pulled me to my feet. “A philosopher builds a foundation of a thousand-thousand truths, that’s what you told me. He’s using those truths now. He’s lecturing us.”

Socrates hummed in surprise as I struck him with a plain truth.

Kronos leaves his mark. With age comes gray hair, with gray hair comes infirmity.

Just as I had before, in dealing with that trio of young philosopher boys, and later when fighting the Rein-Holder’s two crows, I observed my pneuma’s natural reaction to a force that I had no knowledge of, and I understood. I saw the flickering light, felt the rush of my influence surging out of me of its own accord. I felt the same thing that Sol has felt and conveyed to me through our shadows.

A Hero distills the strength of a thousand-thousand different truths into himself, turns each and every one into pure power. But a Philosopher deals directly in these truths. He isn’t yet strong enough to bend them entirely to his will.

He can only guide them.

The truth of old age struck Socrates and in my mind’s eye I saw it do its unstoppable work. I saw it weigh down his posture, hunch his back, and drive into the segments of his fingers its aches and ruinous pains. I saw the hand of time press him down and make an infirmity of him.

I saw the theory of it in perfect clarity. Unfortunately, the reality of things was slightly different

“A gray hair can be a sign of many things,” Socrates said for my benefit, verbalizing the counterpoint that he invoked with his pneuma. “A sign of age, yes. Or a poor diet. A deviation of the heart, also known as stress. Even a god given pigment at birth.”

My attack, such as it was, slid off him like rainwater. But that was fine. I knew the trick of it now.

And so did Sol.

“A young man can’t teach another young man how to be wise,” Sol asserted, pacing along the edge of the cave, his pneuma catching the dispersed streams of my plain truth and reforming them. “You’re the master of my master’s master. A wise man, who taught a wise man, who taught a wise man. Old three times over.”

“Who says a young man can’t be wise?” Socrates challenged.

I answered instead. “A young man is like a puppy with an argument. He can’t truly understand it. One of the definitions of wisdom is experience, and experience comes with time.”

“You need wisdom to be wise,” Sol completed the thought. And together as one, we struck the old philosopher with the truth of his years.

Socrates huffed something almost like a laugh. “And yet here you are, trying to lecture the lecturer.” And that was all it took to brush us off his shoulder. I exchanged a look with Sol as he continued to circle behind the philosopher. “Not the worst attempt, but certainly not the best. Age leads to infirmity, true enough, but in degrees. There are things that we can do, things that we must do as men of virtue, to preserve our strength and craft our perfect bodies. A cultivator is the same, but even more so.”

Sol and I moved as one, closing the gap once again.

“But enough of that.”

Something like one thousand flickering whispers in Socrates’ influence were the only warning I got, and then I was outside the cave, my torso and head hanging over the edge of Kaukoso Mons. Upside down, the Half-Step City was truly dazzling in the early morning light. I blinked as I noticed a familiar silhouette up above, which was to say below, crouched in the shadow of a nondescript alcove similar to Socrates’ own.

Lefteris stared down at me, which was to say up at me, with wide-eyed intent. He had his bow in hand, its gold string pulled back taut despite not having an arrow nocked to it as far as I could tell.

Who? he mouthed to me.

Blearily, I watched the blood drain from his face as Socrates stepped out of his cave.

“These games you’re playing, and the people you’re playing them with,” he told me, “the consequences are real. They're severe. And they aren’t yours to bring about so frivolously. You two have attracted remarkable people to you and roped them into something entirely unreasonable. Have you considered why they were willing to follow you? Have you considered what they stand to gain, or more importantly, what they stand to lose if things don’t settle the way you implied they would?”

Behind him, back in the cave, I saw Sol struggling to rise. His celestial spear had been returned to him, driven through the meat of his left thigh in such a way as to render the entire limb useless.

“I never lied,” I said defiantly.

“No,” Socrates acknowledged. “You didn’t. But neither did you tell the clear truth. You decided they didn’t deserve it.”

I bared my teeth and forced my body to move, sitting up from the edge.

“You don’t know me.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “But I’ve experienced you. And I’ve experienced your father.”

My eyes widened.

“You scarlet sons are all the same,” the wise man said, bending down and gripping in his fist the golden shawl that I’d been using both as a belt and as a satchel for my tribulation mask. He lifted me up by it, regarding me critically. “You want to see all there is to see, do all that there is to do, and damn all of the natural consequences. You want to challenge, and to be challenged? So be it.”

He turned, and the muscles of his arm bulged.

“Behold - tribulation.”

And he threw me up into the storm that never ceased.

1.33

The Son of Rome

We flew.

There was no other way to describe it. The old man in his rags of unassuming filth held tight to my hair and pulled me up to heaven, faster than sound could travel. The city of Olympia grew small beneath us in the blink of an eye.

No man can ever truly fly, of course. That had been hammered into my head long ago, as it had into every cultivator. It was the core conceit of those that pursued divinity. A natural desire, one felt anytime you looked up at a cloudless sky, or down at a sprawling valley. It almost seemed a natural step along the path of advancement. After all, why else would man cultivate virtue if not to claim the heights that his father couldn’t reach?

On more than one punishing campaign, camped out beneath the Republic’s siege works outside, I had gazed up at a city’s stubbornly kept walls and longed to simply vault them like a garden fence. And why not? The men of Gaius’ legions were surely powerful enough for such a maneuver. Alas, my father had soon corrected me of that delusion, and my uncle had later enforced the lesson.

Our hunger was something no man could escape. For as long as we had looked up and seen, we had desired the climb - for no other reason than that we could. But there were some places that even a cultivator couldn’t go.

There were some domains that even the mightiest Tyrant didn’t dare trespass. Heaven was one such domain.

What the man who claimed to be my master’s master did was not flight - more of an absurd hop - but in that moment before freefall, while we hung weightless in the air, I felt the weight of heaven’s notice. It was no cultivator’s sense or legion instinct that allowed me to detect it.

Any man could hear the thunder.

And it was made all the more apparent by the fact that we were hurtling directly towards the Raging Heaven’s tribulation crown, the Storm That Never Ceased. I finally regained the breath that had been knocked out of me by our rapid ascent and shouted a curse, calling upon the captain's virtue with force enough that the air itself groaned, a subsonic vibration that would have shattered stone walls if we had been around any.

The old vagrant’s rags might have flapped a bit more insistently than they already were in the wind, maybe, but that was the only reaction I got for my efforts. The man himself didn’t even twitch. Just tightened his grip on my hair, and then without warning twisted and heaved me down at a small chasm in the mountain, just below the storm.

It was like being shot from a bow. I flexed the captain's virtue desperately, but I wasn’t in the business of using it on myself, and so all I could do was clear a few particularly painful looking rocks from my path before I plowed into the cave, my vision flashing white as I crashed through stone and kept going.

A bare, filthy foot came down on my back, stopping me abruptly. My head whipped forward and then back, cracking against the stone with the momentum, and I glared blearily up.

The vagrant philosopher stepped off of me, shrugging out of the soiled layers of cloth he’d built his aura of anonymity out of, until he stood over me in a simple white toga. He crossed his arms, and as the weight of his expectation came down upon me, crushing me to the stone as I tried to rise, I came to a realization.

The reason that Griffin and I had experienced such success in our subterfuge since arriving at the Half-Step City. The reason why Scythas, Alyssa, Kyno, Lefteris, Jason, and Anastasia had so readily accepted our posturing and vague implications despite only being philosophers. It wasn’t that we were spectacular actors. It wasn’t even that we were particularly special.

My master’s master waved a hand, and the overpowering thunder of the Raging Heaven’s perpetual storm vanished into mist and whispers. No, it was more than that. As the whiplash ringing faded from my ears, I understood that all of the background noise of nature, the ever present hum that existed even here on this mountain, was suddenly gone. Like it had never existed in the first place.

Heroes greater than us were willing to believe our lies, because men like this existed in the world.

“ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα hèn oîda hóti oudèn oîda.”

“… What?” I asked.

A truly wrathful expression overtook him. I tensed, and my blood thundered in my ears, but he mastered it in the next moment, scoffed and spat on the cave floor.

“He didn’t even bother to teach you a thinking man’s tongue? I’ll throttle that boy the next time I see him.”

“He did,” I protested, this time in the Scarlet City’s tongue rather than the Latin I had been defaulting to lately.

“Alikoan,” my master’s master said with distaste. “The ugliest language in the Greek Isles, to match her ugliest city. Why would he teach you that tongue over his own?”

I thought back. Many of Aristotle‘s teachings were more impressions than they were true recollections, overshadowed by years on campaign, years at war, and a year of shellshocked slavery. But this one stood out. It always had. It had been cemented in my memory the moment the shackles were affixed to my wrists.

“He told me that I would need it,” I said quietly. “He told me it was the most important language I could possibly know.”

I spent more than one sleepless night as a slave wondering how much Aristotle had suspected. How much he could have possibly known. And I had wondered how much more he knew - it was why I was here, searching for him. It was why I’d been found.

“That boy,” my master’s master muttered, running callused fingers through a long white beard. The man was built like a siege weapon, sculpted in the way of the Greek heroes we had been keeping company with, but with more overt signs of his age. The color of his hair, washed out. Crows feet at the corners of his eyes. And deep, thinking lines carved across his forehead.

“You said Aristotle was your student’s student,” I said. He grunted, eyes distant as he thought. “Do you know where he is?”

“West.”

My heart sank. Alikos. I should have known. For a year I’d assured myself that he couldn’t possibly be back in the Scarlet City, that he surely would have sought me out if he was. I should have known that was a child’s delusion.

He wasn’t my friend. He was my mentor, and my father wasn’t alive to pay him his due anymore. He didn’t owe me anything.

“No.”

I blinked. “No?”

“No,” the old philosopher repeated. “Further.”

Further west? “Impossible.”

Somehow, the silence grew even quieter. The very air between us seemed to hold its breath. The philosopher looked down upon me, and in a deathly quiet voice he asked, “What did you just say?”

“That’s impossible,” I repeated. “I’ve seen what’s west of the Scarlet City. If he’s still out there, he’s dead.”

“You think so, do you?”

I matched his glare in defiance, and with memories of howling thunder informed him, “I know.”

The philosopher kicked me in the gut, and I gagged as dust and shattered stone filtered around my head. Seconds later, my senses caught up to the rest of me and I realized that I had been buried in the far wall of the cave.

“You know?” the old philosopher said, advancing on me. “You know nothing. In fact, you know even less than that. Was Aristotle such a failure that he couldn’t plant a single thought in that thick Roman skull of yours?”

He grabbed me by the neck and pulled me out of the stone. I snarled and spat in his face. The spittle halted a hairsbreadth from his eyes, and then abruptly whipped back into mine. Worthless, sanctimonious Greeks.

“What is it that you think you’ve been doing since you darkened these shores?” he demanded. “What have you accomplished, and to what end?”

Contrary to his demand for answers, his hand only tightened further around my throat. I forced the words out, even as I scanned our surroundings in my peripherals. It was a cave like any other, but with the bare echoes of habitation to show for the philosopher’s presence. A bedroll off to my left, a small set of cups and plates to my right, along with a small mountain of rolled up papyrus and various tablets.

“I came here looking for Aristotle,” I choked.

“Is that what you call this?” The old philosopher demanded, and reached for my shadow. The darkened silhouette, already undulating wildly in the scattered lights of the storm outside the cave, darted inexplicably away from his hand. Moving with its own intent. “Inserting yourself into a political struggle that you have no stake in, no influence over, for no reason at all other than to cause mayhem? Because you believe you can? What are you thinking?”

“I think,” I hissed, “that scavengers are eating this place alive.”

“So you decided to join in, take a bite for yourself?”

“No. I decided to take a bite out of them.”

Gravitas rocked the cave, and though it didn’t move the old philosopher, the stone that I took hold of with the captain’s virtue and slammed into the back of his head certainly did. He staggered forward a step, against me, and I slammed my forehead into his nose. It was like headbutting Kaukoso Mons itself, but I forced down the nausea and thrashed free while he was stunned.

My shadow offered up the celestial bronze spear and I gripped it tight, turning and whipping its tip up with all my strength.

The philosopher caught it by the shaft and struck me once with his free hand. I lost another few moments, and when I came to again I was laying on my back just outside of the cave, staring up into the storm. Dew droplets trickled down my face, mingling with the blood of a broken nose. Lightning flashed a thousand times in rapid succession, vast branching networks of lights that were swallowed up by storm clouds in the next instant. In the distance, I heard a familiar shriek.

The philosopher grabbed me by my foot and dragged me back into the cave.

“I won’t be lied to, boy,” the philosopher said as if nothing had happened. “And I won’t be sweet-talked either.” If he had taken any lasting damage from my suckerpunch, I couldn’t see it. He dropped me in the middle of the cave and sat beside me, legs crossed, one hand on a knee while the other propped up his chin.

I stared mutinously up at the stone ceiling for a long moment, before common sense got the better of my pride. This wasn’t what I had been looking for, but it was an opportunity that I wasn’t likely to get twice. And he had said that he was going to teach me the way of the world.

Either I had found myself a new mentor - been found by, more like - or I was about to die. One way or another, I had to make the most of this.

“I came here looking for Aristotle,” I said again. “I’d just broken through in my cultivation and I was exploring one of my new senses at the kyrios’ funeral. Accidentally tipped off half a dozen Heroic Cultivators, made them think I was looking for a fight. What could I do but make them think I was more than I am? Make myself seem too dangerous to fight.”

“Why not explain your mistake and apologize for it?”

I lifted a shoulder in a shrug, not bothering to sit up. My head and nose were throbbing in time with one another, an obnoxious beat. The ground was comfortable enough for the moment.

“I’m a stranger in a bizarre, barbarous land. How was I to know that one of them wouldn’t take offense to my wasting their time? Who would punish a great hero for stepping on an insolent young philosopher?”

“I would.”

I glanced at my master’s master. He met my gaze steadily, and after a moment I nodded.

“I believe you. But I’d still be dead.”

“Justice would be served,” he points out.

“Not good enough. I have things I need to do before I die, whether it’s justice or not.”

The old man considered that for a long moment, and then he asked, “What is the first virtue?”

“Freedom.”

The old philosopher looked at me like I had grown another head. “Are you out of your mind, boy?”

I raised an eyebrow. “This is the free Mediterranean, is it not?”

“Aristotle truly did you a disservice,” he said, disgusted. “It’s a question of your soul, boy, not just your belief. It’s a matter of foundation.”

Foundation.

“What does it take for a man to lead?”

“Gravitas,” I answered, properly this time. The old philosopher grunted.

“And what is gravitas?”

I forced myself to sit up, turned my head and spat as much of the blood out of my mouth as I could. I inhaled deeply, tracing my vital breath through the channels old and new inside my body. And I forced myself to remember.

“Gravitas is three thousand men sprinting into Tartarus at your command,” I said, each word like broken glass in my throat. “It’s four hundred and eighty shields at your back while you plunge into the enemy’s open mouth. It’s three hundred screaming horses crashing into the sea.

“It’s weight.”

“Weight?” The philosopher echoed

I nodded once, staring past his shoulder, into the distant past. “Every man is a world unto himself. He’s a city, a family, a wife and children, friends and enemies and comrades. He’s hopes and dreams, aspirations of changing all that he can change. He’s all of these things, and he is heavy.

“Gravitas is the weight of three thousand of those men. It’s three thousand worlds, three thousand lives that could have been, borne on your shoulders.

“It is salt,'' I rasped. “And it is ash.”

For a long moment, the cave was silent but for the memories. And then a strong, calloused hand gripped my shoulder.

“How old are you, boy?” my master’s master asked me, not unkindly.

“Twenty.”

“An age of child tyrants,” he said, and sighed. “These demons in the west. You’re certain they weren’t human? The world is a vast place, full of odd people.”

I thought of snarling fangs and slitted eyes the color of tribulation lightning. Whatever he saw in me at that moment, the philosopher didn’t press the point further.

“A handful of lost heroes won’t be enough to combat a force like that,” he said, shaking his head and rising to his feet. He slapped down the wrinkles in his tunic. “If it’s demons you’re after, you’ll need more. You’ll need to be more.”

Sorea shrieked again, far closer this time.

“How did you know about the demons?” I asked, and then pressed, “How did you know we were responsible for what happened at the bathhouse? That we’ve been hunting crows?”

The old philosopher snorted. “I don’t know anything, boy. I listen, and I learn. It’s astounding what a man will say when he thinks there’s no one important around to hear him. It’s even more astounding what a man will say when he thinks it won’t hurt to let a few things slip.”

My master’s master flexed the fingers of his hands and rolled his shoulders, turning to squarely face the cave’s entrance.

“And most astounding of all,” he said with powerful disdain, bracing his feet, “is what a fool will say when he wants to be heard.”

Sorea shrieked a third time, just below, and the sun dawned twice.

[Dawn arrives upon its throne.]

Griffon exploded through the entrance with blood on his face and fire in his fists. And just before my master’s master could slap him out of the air, I lunged up and drove my shoulder into the old philosopher’s back, knocking him off balance. It only lasted a fraction of a moment. It was enough.

Griffon struck him like a comet.

1.32

The Young Griffon

“Right, you just happened to cross paths after the funeral, and just happened to come to an accord on the topic of insurrection out of the goodness of your hearts,” Elissa said skeptically, throwing a wet towel at Kyno. He didn’t bother opening his eyes, reclined as he was at the edge of the hot bath, only grunting as the towel slapped against his face.

“To think that you marked us all from the start,” Jason murmured, shaking his head. He had disdained the hot bath entirely, back stroking idly through the cold pool after a quick cleansing. “How did you know we’d all be open to this insanity?”

Sol, upon realizing that the question wasn’t rhetorical and that I wasn’t rushing to answer it for him, paused his vicious scrubbing to think up an answer that sounded appropriately ominous.

“One of your elders marked you all that night,” he said, finally. Anastasia, from her place close by him, blinked and paused with her own olive branch scrubbing, visibly putting the pieces together. She hadn’t been there when Sol had declared the presence of a greater cultivator’s attention.

“That’s why you called out to me,” she said, caustic green eyes flickering. She then affected a pout, leaning sideways into his personal space. “And here I thought it was my beauty that had caught your eye.”

Sol sighed and shoved her back.

“One way or another, you weren’t going to suffer these maneuverings for long without acting,” he said flatly. “Not without losing a part of yourselves. Or, if the crows got to you first, having it taken from you.”

“You say that…” Kyno murmured, peeling the towel back from his eyes to look gravely at Sol. “But there were six of us that night that you called, and now there are only four.”

“Five,” Anastasia corrected idly. I raised an eyebrow, fully opening eyes that had been half lidded for most of our time in the bath house

“Ho? Did you make another friend, Sol?” I asked, curious. Sol and I hadn’t had a chance to exchange a private word since the previous night’s festivities had given way to the dawn. Our new companions had done more than enough chattering for the both of us after we’d commandeered an unopened bath house. The place was closed indefinitely for reconstruction, not because of the late kyrios’ final breath, but because an unfortunate soul had recently plowed straight through the roof and collapsed a portion of the building. It had happened a few nights back, it seemed, and the villains responsible had yet to be found.

“Just a girl in over her head,” he dismissed, though there was a pensive frown there. Of course, I didn’t fail to notice the tense looks that Jason and Elissa shot my brother at his casual statement.

“You say that,” Anastasia murmured, “but the two of you seemed quite familiar. And she was determined to tag along.”

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“Back on the mountain where she belongs,” Sol said, shaking his head. “We spoke briefly after the kyrios’ funeral. She’s just a child with a powerful father, looking for an escape from her sheltered life.”

“How immature,” I said disdainfully, and Sol snorted, lips quirking in amusement

“That is… certainly one way to describe her,” Anastasia said, amusement warring with genuine uncertainty. “The two of you just happened to run into one another?”

“After you and I split up,” he said, nodding.

“Unbelievable,” Jason muttered.

“How many of the aristois do you have tucked away in your tunic?” Elissa pressed, accepting a jug of olive oil from Anastasia and dumping a generous portion over her shoulders and arms. Jason’s eyes flickered, towards the trailing streams of oil that wound their way into the small dips of her scars.

“The aristois?” Kyno muttered, lifting his head fully and, with something like dread, asking, “This girl. How powerful is her father, exactly?”

At that, three sets of eyes flickered Sol’s way. Seeking permission to speak, for all of Anastasia’s teasing and Elissa’s surly demeanor. He nodded, glancing my way, and I realized after a moment that he didn’t know the answer to that question any more than I did. But they did.

Elissa took his permission, and said shortly, “It was Selene.”

Kyno stared at her for a long moment. He looked then, to Sol, seeking confirmation. Sol nodded.

The Heroic Huntsman of the Broken Tide tossed his head back, striking the stone lip of the pool hard enough to crack it.

“‘Zalus’ daughter,” he breathed, pressing two massive hands to his face, palms digging into his eyes. “You’ve brought Zalus’ daughter into this.”

“I haven’t brought her into anything. She isn’t a part of this.”

Zalus, I mused. I wondered why that name sounded familiar. Old Zalus, I heard in someone else’s distant voice, a faint memory.

“She isn’t a part of this, yet she joined you on your hunt? She took up arms against the ruling factions of the Raging Heaven? And she isn’t involved?” Kyno pressed, rubbing insistently at his eyes. I offered him a few pankration hands to help, and he batted irritably at them, splashing me with scalding water.

I dashed wet hair from my eyes, frowning faintly. Old Zalus, that memory mused. The name was spoken with contempt.

“She didn’t take up any arms,” Sol said, returning to his scrubbing. “And she won’t be in the future. Not with us.” Anastasia cupped a palm beneath a trickle of olive oil and overturned it on his back, adding to his scrubbing with her own olive branch. She smiled innocently when he turned flat gray eyes on her.

“And yet she promised to find us again tonight,” the caustic Heroine put forward.

Old Zalus, my father said, in a child’s vague memory. My eyes lit up.

“You’ve caught the eye of a Tyrant’s daughter,” I accused him delightedly. He mastered himself as he always had, revealing nothing to our companions, but I could see the sudden dread as his worst suspicions were confirmed. “Not only that, but the eye of our own scarlet Tyrant's daughter! You sly Roman dog!”

“You’re not supposed to say that,” Jason despaired, ceasing his backstroke and floating miserably in the water and as he stared up through the gaping hole in the ceiling. “You’re supposed to tell us that you’re acting with the Rosy Dawn’s blessing.”

“Who said we aren’t?” I asked, unable to contain my smile. Elissa slapped her branch against the surface of the pool, kicking up a spray of steaming water.

“As if he would consent to his daughter’s involvement,” she hissed. Desert heat eyes burned with a fearful wrath. “You may think we’re fools, but we’re not! Involving her in these games is madness, and not the kind that you adore. He would never allow it.”

“The question was,” I repeated slowly, with purpose, “who says we aren’t acting with the Rosy Dawn’s blessing?” I relished the looks, the tension. “Is Old Zalus the Rosy Dawn?”

“No,” Kyno said, darkly resigned.

”Who is?” I asked gently.

“Damon Aetos,” Sol said, when it became clear that no one else would.

“This is a fine line you’re walking,” Anastasia warned, though even in her seriousness she continued to caress and poke at Sol with her olive branch. “Even for someone like you. The elders of the Raging Heaven are in conflict now, that’s true, but an outsider is still an outsider. If we prod them too hard, too fast, they may just decide to act as they should and band together to purge you from the ranks.”

“And us with you,” Elissa added. With something like disgust for herself, she said, ”We’ve thrown our lot in with you two. Don’t go dragging us down to Tartarus with you.”

That one affected Sol, hit him somewhere raw and painful. I inserted my own voice before the others could pile on.

“Of course we won’t. How could we, when we have no intention of going there ourselves?” I chuckled. “Not until we’re ready for a dip in the Styx, at least.”

“So if the elders turn against us instead of each other,” Kyno said. “You can take them all?”

Allow me to be clear.

Sol and I had amassed something of a myth between ourselves since arriving on the shores of Olympia. Something small and infirm, but no less powerful for the people that it touched. These cultivators surrounding us in this bath were true heroes and heroines. They had cut their teeth on monsters and villains, and been acknowledged by the Fates and the Muses both for their struggles.

Compared to their full splendor, Sol and I just weren’t enough. Their capacity for cultivation dwarfed ours by several factors, a question of exponents rather than multipliers. In a just world, they would outstrip us in every metric.

But they were afraid. And for reasons that Sol and I had only just begun to unravel, they were, each of them, haunted by distant troubles. They had an obligation to right what was wrong as heroes, and because they were not fulfilling their divine imperative, because their very essence told them that they were not living their lives the right way, Sol and I had stepped in to fill that void.

But that did not mean we were delusional. Sol and I were destined for great things, and I intended to grasp even greater things than that, but a Philosopher was still a Philosopher. A Hero was still a Hero.

And a Tyrant was still a Tyrant.

Our new companions had just about convinced themselves of an absurd estimation of our relative strength. But even then, trying to claim that we could take on all of the elders of the Raging Heaven alone was a step too far. Even implying it would be an outrageous lie.

So I told him the truth. ”Of course not. We’re scavengers snapping at the heels of powerful beasts, hoping they’ll turn their irritation on their rivals before they come for us. A single mistake could be the end of us all.”

“We put on that performance last night for a reason,” Sol added, contributing to my point as naturally as if it had been his own, just the student parroting what his master had designed. “As far as your elders are concerned, you were kidnapped in the night. Go back now, fabricate a passing story of your escape, and wash your hands of this.”

We would have to flee the city, of course, and that would be a shame. But the Oracles weren’t going anywhere. The Olympics would come again in four years. And there were other ways to grow strong without devouring the starlight marrow of Tyrants.

If these Heroic cultivators truly feared death more than they despised the yoke of a tyrant, then there was nothing we could do for them.

“Dammit,” Jason said quietly. ”Dammit. I said I was with you, Solus. I won’t let you make me a liar.”

Elissa‘s jaw clenched, but she shook her head once when I glanced her way. Kyno, likewise, resigned himself with a low sigh.

“You have us netted,” Anastasia said, propping her chin up on one hand. ”If you say that Selene and her stark father won’t be an issue, I’ll choose to believe you for now. But the good hunter raises a fair point. Scythas and the archer are notable in their absence. Have you approached them yet? Will you?”

“Lefteris has been doing his best to avoid us since he incurred my master's wrath,” I said, amused. ”But I’ve kept an ear out, and if the Fates are kind I should be able to find him before sundown.”

“And if they aren’t kind?” Elissa asked, in the suffering tone of someone who knew what the answer would be before she asked her question. I smirked.

“I’ll find him anyway.”

“And what of sweet Scythas?” Anastasia pressed, watching intently as Sol dipped his head down into the scalding bath, rising back up and running his fingers through coarse black hair.

“Scythas will find us,” Sol said with certainty. Anastasia hummed, accepting that without protest.

“We’ll have to lay low for the time being,” Jason mused, pulling himself from the bath and grabbing a towel. “Kaukoso Mons is off-limits for now. We can’t exactly be kidnapped every single night, after all.”

“We’ll have to find neutral ground,” Kyno agreed and rose at the same time, shifting aside the tail of the crocodile skin that he’s been wearing the entire time to wrap a towel around his waist.

“I have a place,” Elissa said simply, wringing the moisture from her hair.

As we filed out of the baths and into the light of day with towels over our heads to partially cover our faces, under the guise of drying our hair, Jason eyed the awakening streets of Olympia’s eastern district warily.

“We’re already tempting the Fates, being out like this,” he said in a low voice.

I snorted, tilting my head at our rapt audience. To our left, a pair of women were hollering at one another from their adjacent balconies about some spat or another from the day before. On the streets themselves a handful of children raced around in a game of tag, and a couple stray hounds sniffed around an old vagrant in filthy rags sleeping fitfully in the shade cast by the damaged bathhouse. By the standards of the Half-Step City, it was deserted.

“I think they’ll keep this to themselves,” I told Jason, laughing as he jabbed at me with an elbow.

“You think so, do you?”

I glanced down at the vagrant in his rags. The old man had cracked an eye open, and now he stared balefully up at me. Plain brown eyes with no flames behind them. The eddies of my influence brushed against him and found nothing of particular note. Just an old man sleeping on the street.

Sol and our companions regarded the vagrant warily, looking to one another and exchanging silent words of intent. The Heroic cultivators among us shifted their towels just so, hiding as much of their defining features as they could. For Kyno and Elissa, whose stature and scars betrayed them regardless, it was a fairly comical sight.

“Grandfather,” I greeted respectfully, inclining my head. “These lowly sophists were in dire need of a bath. Please forgive our indiscretion.”

“I’ve forgiven you for more than that,” he said, surly and gray. He propped himself up on an elbow and shifted his rags, drawing them tighter around himself. It was still winter after all, and the sun had only just arisen. For someone without an advanced cultivator’s constitution, it was uncomfortably cool here in the shade. “You young cultivators are all the same. It wasn’t enough that you vandalized this bathhouse, rendered it unusable for the citizens it was built to accommodate. You had to add insult to injury, return and make use of it while the rest of the city couldn’t.”

I blinked, and slowly, asked the man, “Who said we vandalized this building?”

“I did.” The vagrant cleared his throat and spat phlegm on the street beside him.

Kyno placed a massive hand on my shoulder, pulling subtly, urging me back. I shrugged him off.  “It was like this when we got here this morning,” I informed the vagrant.

He sneered. “You’re a terrible liar, boy.”

Sol inhaled deeply.

“My virtuous heart won’t accept such an insult,” I said very quietly. “Not even from an old man.”

“A truth told with false intent is a lie like any other,” he said, waving me off. The audacity of this homeless wretch. “Every man in the Half-Step City knows how to twist his words and make them pretty. What makes a man shine is not rhetoric alone. It is substance.”

Sol stepped forward, suddenly keenly interested. “Who are you to say that? Are you a philosopher?” His influence rippled out to test the man the same way mine had, and found just as little oing by the frown on his face.

“Philosopher,” the old man echoed, and spat again. “No, boy, philosophers are men in the business of knowing things. Look at me. Do I look like a man that knows anything at all?”

“Your definition of a philosopher is different from mine,” Sol said, that storm gathering in his eyes. I muscled down my annoyance and forced myself to look past it, deeper.

“By all means,” invited the vagrant. “Enlighten me.”

“Sol,” Jason murmured, edging up beside him. His eyes continue to shift behind the edges of the towel, watching as more and more people trickled out of their homes and businesses onto the streets. “We should go.”

“In a moment,” Sol said, distracted. He knelt in the front of the living bundle of filthy rags, Anastasia kneeling down beside him with curiosity and a vague puzzlement in her eyes. “I was taught that a philosopher is a man that knows only one thing, and that is the fact that he doesn’t know anything at all.”

The old man snorted. “How pretentious. You might as well call them fools, if that’s all that distinguishes them.”

Sol didn’t respond for a long moment, searching the old man’s face for something. “Truth told with false intent is a lie,” he finally said. “What would you call an opposed opinion that you present as your own?”

“I’d call that disingenuous.”

“And I’d call you a liar,” Sol said with something like triumph. “You know what it means to say that a philosopher is a man who knows he knows nothing. It’s an admission of man’s limitation. It’s the crystallization of a mindset.”

The old man tilted his head. “Who taught you those words, boy?”

Sol leaned forward, eager now, but I saw the puzzlement in Anastasia turn to something deeper. Troubled. She was racking her brain for something crucial, just out of reach. I frowned, manifesting three pankration hands behind Jason, Kyno, and Elissa, tapping between their shoulder blades with gentle rosy heat. We settled into postures not visibly threatening, but ready nonetheless.

“My mentor,” the Roman said with rising purpose. “He guided me as a boy. I owe a portion of my best traits to him. Have you heard of him? Better than that, have you met him?”

“How would I be able to tell you when you haven’t given me a name?”

Anastasia’s eyes suddenly widened. I inhaled sharply through my nose.

“In my city, he was called the man that knows everything,” Sol confessed. “My other tutors called him the Father of Rhetoric.

“But his name is Aristotle.”

Anastasia stared at the old man in abject terror.

“Foolish,” the old vagrant sighed. And he rose, shedding his soul's disguise.

For a single endless moment, I stared without comprehension at the space where he had been, reclining fitfully on the road, and where he stood now, palming Sol’s head where he knelt. For that moment, as the old man’s formless veil of inconsequence fell away from him, and that same terror in Anastasia‘s eyes spread immediately to all of the mythical Heroes in our group, I was as paralyzed as them.

But it was only a moment.

[The dawn breaks.]

Twenty fists of pankration intent blazed as they crossed the distance between us, reaching, clawing, striking. I leveraged the full weight of my pneuma and lunged forward, reaching for my brother where he knelt.

[Dawn gives way to dusk.] intoned the old man’s soul. The fire in my palms guttered out, and I felt the jarring shock of bare fists slamming into an utterly unyielding surface as they hit him. The old man’s filthy rags shifted beneath my assault, the only reaction he gave, and fell away to reveal a body like twisted iron.

“Arrogant child,” he said, lashing out with a backhand that I caught on crossed forearms, slamming me back across the street with force enough to dig furrows in the dirt.

Gravitas rocked the street, sending citizens and children that had not yet noticed the confrontation tumbling. Screams rose into the air on black wings. But try as he might, Sol could not rise against the hand on his head. The storm roiled in his eyes.

“Turning justice upon me like I have anything to fear from it,” the old man said to me contemptuously. “Citing your heart’s virtue while you skirt around a lie. You have no concept of virtue. Where is the excellence in your soul?”

“You’re…” Anastasia breathed.

“That’s-” Jason bit.

“I am nothing,” said the vagrant, dismissing each of them in turn. He glanced down at Sol, watching him struggle. He inclined his head, acknowledging, “I am a learning man. A philosopher. And I know what I know.”

These cowards. These worthless mongrels. Why weren’t they fighting?

I leapt straight up, twisting and reaching into my shadow, pulling from it the raven’s broad celestial axe and wreathing it in rosy flame.

[The sun rises.]

The vagrant didn’t even look up.

[Night falls.]

I fell out of the sky and slammed back down to earth in a crouch, heels driving through the dirt. I exhaled sharply and rose again. My senses continued to tell me the same thing they’d been telling me since he shrugged off his unremarkable veil.

His pneuma, without question, was that of a Philosopher. No more.

And yet.

“No student of Aristotle would have made such a mess in such short order,” the old man said, shaking his head. Sol glared up at him as best he could. “You’ve only been here for, what, a week? Five days? You’re lying to me, or else that young fool did you a grave disservice.”

I gathered my pneuma and laid a hand on the pommel of my uncle's blade. I felt my blood begin to boil.

Sol snarled. “He did the best he could with what he was given.”

“Then he failed. And as his master's master, I have no choice but to make right what he left unfinished.” Without looking, without turning his dull, unassuming eyes my way, the old man waved his hand, as if to brush a fly from his shoulder, and I blinked as rubble and ruined stone rained down around my head. I realized that I wasn’t standing poised to attack, as I had thought I was. I was crouched in the entryway to the bathhouse, having plowed straight through one of its pillars.

Four Heroic cultivators watched, frozen, as the old vagrant raised my brother up and met him glare for glare.

“Aristotle has evidently failed to prepare you for this world. I, your grandfather, will teach you the way of things.”

And then he crouched as if to hop over a puddle and exploded upward, sailing clear over the Half-Step City towards the looming edifice of Kaukoso Mons and its immortal storm crown.

He took Sol with him.

For a long moment no one said a word. Citizens, those that had made it off the streets or never left their homes in the first place, peered out from behind slatted windows and cracked doors, curiosity warring with rational fear. In the distance, the howling of dogs drifted hauntingly on the wind.

One by one, the four heroic Cultivators looked back at me. Whatever it was they saw, it didn’t do much for their unease.

“That’s quite a face, Griffon,” Anastasia whispered, a faint attempt at humor.

I didn’t smile.

1.31

The Unkindness

“Violence is an art.”

The Heroic huntsman, clad in his midnight black rags, twitched and looked over his shoulder. As he did, he palmed another man’s head as easily as one would an apple. The hunting crow regarded the hungry raven on the right, lounging above, in a dip between two conjoined archways.

The raven reached up, twisting his hand as if to grasp the moon the same way the hunting crow had grasped his unfortunate prey. As if to pluck it from the sky, like an apple. The markings on the raven’s bare torso glowed blood red, a muted, seething source of light.

“As much as sculpture, as much as any poem or song, violence is an expression of inspiration. Violence is the oldest art, in fact. The first of them all. Back when the pyramids did not exist and men had fewer thoughts in their heads than fingers on their hands, violence was our first expression of self.”

“What-?” The crow’s prey asked, bewildered, before being slammed face-first into the dirt.

“What?” The hulking crow asked, his voice like tumbling stones. Even beneath the cover of darkness his annoyance was clear.

The hungry raven chuckled and rolled off his leisurely perch, falling-

Another figure of rust and shadows speared through the darkness of the archways, utterly silent and blisteringly quick. The hulking crow tensed and released his prey, raising both hands to catch the assassin’s lunging stab.

The raven fell upon the new arrival with unlikely force, crushing them flat to the ground and raising his knee up before bringing it back down three times in a vicious sequence. Between each crack of the knee, the shadowed assailant twisted and thrashed like a landed fish, and each time the raven expertly countered their attempts to grapple. On the fourth and final knee the would-be assassin arched up and let loose a breathy scream as their spine audibly snapped. They slumped, going abruptly limp.

“It’s easy enough to forget our grim origins,” the raven continued, hoisting the crow up and pulling the hood from their head. A young man with pale, rugged features was revealed. He was still alive, his eyes rolling helplessly in their sockets. “While we lounge in cleansing baths, wearing our silks and ornaments, exchanging our thoughtful discourse. These kind luxuries drive us further from our roots, closer to civilized existence.

“But,” the raven whispered, the sound like shifting sands. He leaned in, his veiled face inches from the paralyzed assassin.

“Even so,” the young man’s eyes, the only part of himself that he could still control, quivered as they stared into the shroud.

“All that we are, and all that the unwashed barbarians of this world are not, was built upon a foundation of inspired violence. We are free to be more, because our brutal ancestors murdered all those that would have made us less.”

“What’s your point?” the hunting crow asked impatiently, unmasking his own captured scavenger and shaking his head at what he found.

“My point, friend, is that I worry for you and our companions,” the raven said softly, his shifting veil brushing against the pale man’s nose. “I worry for you too, little scavenger. For everyone on this mountain.”

The hunting crow bit. “Worry about what?”

“I worry that you’ve forgotten the rules of nature now that you can defy them,” he told the Hero disguised as a crow. “Where is your spark? Where is your creativity for violence? You walk around Olympia like your wrists are bound simply because you can’t leverage the full weight of your soul. What does it matter if you can’t use everything that you have against a lesser opponent? What does it matter if you can’t fight a greater opponent at your fullest strength, even, so long as you are better than them?”

The hulking crow looked silently down at the cuts he’d endured thus far in the night. Nothing more than small cuts and abrasions, but they wept tainted blood, marred by poison.

“Violence is an art like any other,” the hungry raven repeated. “You heroes have grown so used to being the loudest voices in the choir that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be silenced. What it’s like to be outmatched in every aspect except for the one that you can control.”

The distant, victorious cry of an eagle split the night. Their companions had found their marks.

“I consider these nights a return to form,” the raven said, tightening his grip on the paralyzed assassin's neck until his eyes rolled up in his head. Mercifully unconscious. “A crow can’t be anything more than what it is - a scavenger. While you’re here, unable to fight with any of the gifts that make you truly unique in this world, focus on what every man has had from the moment we were shaped from worthless clay.

“With the proper refinement, even a crow can kill a king.”

A bird of midnight ink exploded out of the unconscious assassin’s robes, taking off in the opposite direction of the eagle’s cry with desperate speed. The hulking crow lunged for it, twisting and curling his fingers with obvious intent, but whatever would have happened in the light of day was lost in anonymity.

A massive celestial axe struck the crow cleanly out of the air, spinning end over end and pinning it to the nearby cliff face. It died before it could make a sound.

“And if the muses are kind,” the raven murmured, dropping his charge to pry his axe from the stone. “Why shouldn’t a hero be able to topple a tyrant?”

The hulking crow and his captured scavenger watched, aghast, as the raven tore the ink-black bird apart and sucked the starlight marrow from its bones.

S

“You aren’t used to fighting like this,” the hungry raven on the left observed, parrying the attacks of two separate crows with wide sweeps of his celestial spear. “Constrained.”

Behind him, two Heroes disguised as crows nursed bleeding wounds as they fought off their adversaries.

A murder of the Tyrants’ assassins had taken the initiative, finding before they could be found, and baited them with easy targets separated from the flock. As soon as they’d taken the bait the night had exploded with bloodthirsty scavengers. Both heroic cultivators had sustained cuts that would have killed a lesser existence in the opening moments. That they were who they were was the only reason they could still fight at all.

They were chafing against the bonds of anonymity, that much was clear to see. And the crows capitalized on that inexperience with vicious intent.

“Why would I ever fight like this?” the Sword Song Heroin snarled behind her veil, gripping her bow like she wanted nothing more than to club her opponent over the head with it. She nocked an ordinary arrow to its golden string and let fly, cursing when her opponent dove under it and stabbed at her ankles.

“Moments like these,” the raven replied without hesitation.

“I don’t intend on being in this situation twice,” the disguised Hero of the Alabaster Isles said dryly, weaving through the press of two other crows. Three more idled around the edges of the conflict, taking shots at the raven and his heroic companions as the opportunities presented themselves.

“You will be,” the raven said simply, halting a sweep of his spear mid-motion and jabbing it back into a surging crow’s gut. It was a short, ugly strike, and it took the attacker utterly by surprise. The crow yanked itself off the spear’s head and staggered back, clutching their bleeding wound. “What will you do when you encounter a force that’s greater than yours? What is your only recourse if an enemy beyond your strength attempts to strike you down?”

A pulse of nameless force struck another crow. They abruptly fell sideways as if plummeting off a cliff, slamming into their fellow and sending both to the ground.

“What will you do if not submit?”

“I’ll get stronger,” the Sword Song declared, shifting her grip on her celestial bow and slamming it over a crow’s head. Then, while they were staggered, she lunged into their guard and struck down with a hammer blow, burying an arrow into the juncture between their neck and shoulder in lieu of firing it.

“You don’t have time,” the raven dismissed. “Say the Tyrants come for you tonight. What do you do?”

“We fight together,” spoke the Hero of the Alabaster Isles, pivoting and heaving his warhammer in a two-handed blow at a crow as it leapt at the Sword Song’s back. It slammed home, audibly shattering ribs, sending the scavenger into and through a statue in the nearby grotto.

One of his opponents took the opportunity to hurl their rusted dagger at his back, and an invocation of hissed rhetoric saw the shadows themselves leaping up to tangle his limbs. An arrow struck the dagger midair, and the Sword Song appeared by his side, viciously kicking the crow’s knee out from under it.

“You fight together,” the raven agreed, banishing another crow into their waiting blows. “A man that can fight with the strength of a thousand-thousand men is an incredible force. But five hundred men that can fight like they’re one is even better.”

“It’s been some time since I studied the quadrivium,” the Sword Song admitted through gritted teeth, visibly correcting herself as her body attempted to make certain instinctual motions, combat tricks ingrained over the course of a lifetime. “But I don’t think that math adds up.”

“It doesn’t add, no,” the raven said, his footwork taking him slowly but surely back to them, until the three of them formed a triangle facing outward. The two Heroes had taken cuts, but the enemy was feeling the worst of the confrontation. They paced in a loose ring around them, vanishing and reappearing in the shadows of the grotto’s swaying almond trees.

“Five hundred good men fighting as one don’t add up to a man with the strength of five hundred. It isn’t an additive property.”

The two Heroes disguised as crows stiffened as that nameless pressure settled upon them, adjusting their posture in a dozen small ways, orienting them towards their opponents. They could feel it. Their next steps would be like running downhill, with the raven’s own influence behind them. A tailwind urging them into the mix.

“Left.”

Both heroic crows planted their left feet and shot forward like arrows from a bow. Their opponents reacted with admirable speed, moving to block or counter with daggers and chains and whips of woven hair.

“Your left.” Both heroic cultivators dipped their bodies to the left, dodging counterattacks and slipping through guards.

“Your left, right, left.” The Hero of the Alabaster Isles hammered a left cross into a crow’s face, followed by a right hook and a left uppercut. The Sword Song slipped past a stab aimed at her left breast, over her heart, then spun right and lashed out with her left elbow, shattering a crow’s orbital bone and sending them sprawling bonelessly to the dirt.

The raven sang his legion song.

“When I left Rome."

When I left Rome!

"My mother cried!"

MY MOTHER CRIED!

They surged forward, three acting as one, and the murder of crows fell to pieces in their hands. Soon enough the two Heroic cultivators were rounding up the unconscious bodies and binding them with the same iron threads that had cinched their own wrists earlier that night.

“Cooperation in combat is an exponential force,” the raven explained, wiping the blood from his celestial spear. Where the cloth of his undulating cloak passed blood vanished, but the material never grew damp. “True cooperation, that is.”

“And what does fighting with our hands tied behind our backs have to do with cooperation?” the Sword Song asked, but her confrontational words were betrayed by her tone. Her heart still pounded to the beat of the legion’s crude cadence.

“Fighting together isn’t necessarily fighting as one,” he said patiently. “A group of Heroes can fight side-by-side easily enough, but if they’re each fighting to the tune of their Muses, how can they possibly move as a single unit?”

“Cultivators are unique existences,” the Hero of the Alabaster Isle realized. The raven nodded.

“You Greeks adore the thought of standing alone,” he said without any particular judgment. “Your cultivation reflects that, I think. The problem with being the Hero of your own story is that it is yours and no one else’s. How can you coordinate properly if you're the only one that can possibly fight the way you fight?”

“Practice,” the Song Sword muttered. “Practice and time, more of each the higher you climb.”

“Exactly. On the other hand, there are some things that any soldier can do. The bare basics of war. The ugly foundations that you cultivators race to cover up with towering coliseums of virtuous cultivation.” The raven clenched his fist, and his influence pressed every one of the crows they had captured flat against the dirt.

“But those ugly foundations are firm. They can carry the weight of a man without question.”

“At a certain point what’s lost must outweigh what’s gained by falling in line,” the Sword Song protested. The raven shrugged one shoulder.

“Maybe so. But you aren’t there yet.”

The raven rose suddenly, and both heroes tensed as he looked south up the mountain.

“I found someone sneaking out,” their caustic crow sang. “I found yet another scout!” Bounding down the mountain hundreds of feet at a time, she had a young woman thrown over her shoulder, ankles and wrists tied with iron thread. She was wearing black robes and a threaded black veil, visibly finer than the rags the others had been sporting thus far.

Their fourth companion landed adroitly among them, presenting her capture with a flourish before dumping her on the ground. The young woman grunted softly, evidently still conscious. The raven knelt to pull the hood off her head.

“Where is the man that knows every-”

He went abruptly still. The caustic crow’s high spirits vanished at once. The Hero of the Alabaster Isles hissed through clenched teeth, while the Sword Song viciously cursed.

The raven tilted his head, regarding the young woman as she blinked burning eyes up at him.

“Selene?”

As one, every single ink construct that the would-be assassins were harboring exploded out of their robes, cawing madly and streaking off each in different directions. Above, Sorea shrieked victoriously as he swooped down from the heavens to give chase.

Selene smiled, the scarlet flames behind her eyes flickering merrily.

“I found you, Solus.”

VS 1.30 [Scythas]

Hero of the Scything Squall

Slayer of monsters. Champion of humanity.

Scythas hadn’t been either of those things in a very long time. These days, he hardly remembered what it felt like to be that man.

The Tyrant Aleuas, as a venerated elder of the Raging Heaven Cult, enjoyed the privileges of his own estate at the foot of Kaukoso Mons. A winding series of cobblestone buildings with sloping clay-shingled roofs that flared out at the edges, with several courtyards and natural pools carved out of the mountain where its indigo gem lines were thickest, it spanned over a mile. Citizens and slaves alike that had come to Olympia from the City of Squalls abounded in this estate, serving the elder in Olympia as faithfully as they would the kyrios of the Howling Wind Cult himself.

It was impossible to mistake the place for anyone else’s domain. As Scythas stepped over its boundaries, he felt the weight of the Tyrant’s influence settle on his shoulder like a heavy hand. It pushed, urging him down a singular path. Servants and citizens nodded deferentially and offered their greetings as he passed. Scythas tried to smile in reply. He failed.

At a certain point he was challenged, as all who encroached on Aleuas’ personal quarters were challenged. Two of the elder’s own men, both deep within the Sophic Realm, held out their hands to stop him. They wore the arms and armor of the Howling Wind with pride.

The Tyrant’s influence swept them aside before they could speak, and Scythas stalked into the elder’s home.

On his way to the central, beating heart of the estate, he was spotted by a young woman that looked like she’d just stumbled out of a hurricane, her hair a mess of windswept curls and her fine silk dress riddled with tears and damp spots. Her eyes were the color of harvest wheat, a hazel so bright it was nearly gold, and freckles swept across the bridge of her nose like a summer breeze.

Surrounded by fussing women both younger and older than her, she nonetheless picked him out as he passed by the adjacent hall. Holding a hand palm up, she softly blew something invisible his way, her eyes holding his.

“Good morning, brave hero,” he heard her, clear as day from across the hall. As if she had whispered it directly into his ear. Gooseflesh erupted up and down his arms.

“Good morning, princess,” he murmured back in the same way, sans theatrics. She smiled warmly before her minders pulled her around the corner and out of sight.

Brave hero. Scythas swallowed back bile, pressing forward to his destination.

The Tyrant’s estate was a reflection of the Howling Wind Cult that he had once ruled over as kyrios, and his personal chambers were a reflection just the same. The former lord’s personal eccentricities, from what he had been told, had not changed overly much in the centuries since his displacement from the City of Squalls to Olympia.

Windchimes hung from the ceilings, the banisters, and the furniture all throughout the room, each swaying in a breeze with no readily felt source. Chimes of hollow wood that whistled, chimes of gold that resonated as they struck one another, and even chimes of the Raging Heaven’s own tribulation amethyst that flashed and hummed as the breeze took them. The cumulative effect was a low, rolling song that urged all that heard it to be at ease.

Scythas set his shoulders and stepped fully into the room, following a narrow path through the swinging chimes and falling to one knee in front of an ornate curtain of viridian silk. The curtain spanned from wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, effectively cutting the room in half.

“Scythas,” spoke the Hurricane Hierophant of the Howling Wind Cult. The curtain of sheer viridian rippled in the breeze. “Thank you for coming.”

Scythas stared straight ahead, consciously choosing not to track the shadows that shifted behind the curtain.

“Sir.” He nodded once. “You called for me?”

“I did, I did,” he said, and the curtain bulged and shifted from side to side, as if a hand was waving dismissively through it. Despite the fact that the shadowed silhouette of a man was ten feet to the right. “Tell me, how goes your training?”

A loaded question, to be sure. When was the last time he’d felt at ease in his own body? “Well enough,” Scythas said.

“Is that so,” Elder Aleuas murmured. Where the wind ended and the Tyrant’s influence began was almost impossible to discern. So when the breeze threaded through Scythas’ hair, tickling the back of his neck, he shivered as if it was the Tyrant’s own hands stroking his head. “Then humor this old man, would you? Let’s hear a whistle.”

In that moment, as every visit to the windchime chamber had a moment, Scythas knew that he was about to die. As surely as he knew that the sea breeze blew cold, Scythas felt his death writ large on the world in that moment, alongside all the other rules of nature.

And so he stoked his heart’s flame and defied them.

Urania, he invoked, a silent plea. He inhaled in ragged relief when he felt her arms settle around his shoulders, felt the cool touch of her cheek press against his as she faced the Tyrant by his side.

As always I am with you, hero, she whispered fondly. And as always, you ask of me something my sisters would be better suited giving you. Her crown of stars brushed against his temple as they revolved around her head, warm and inspiring.

She was the Heavenly Muse, the charter of stars and higher mathematics. Indeed, nearly every one of her sisters would have been better suited to this task, Calliope best of all - but Urania was what he had. And so, as always, he would be grateful for what he’d been given. And he would make do.

Scythas let slip his held breath, the vital essence of his body, and his pneuma went with it. A clear, piercing whistle split the cascading song of windchime. At once, a vortex of howling wind enveloped him head to toe. It took only a moment. And it was nearly too slow.

Less than a heartbeat after Scythas sealed himself in his howling vortex, the Hierophant dropped a hurricane on his head.

Steady, Urania urged him, and Scythas eyes narrowed as he shifted the pitch of his whistle. His own gale winds were nothing compared to the tyrants, and natural law dictated that they would be broken and swept away immediately by the stronger currents, but Scythas let his heart’s flame rage and defied that simple truth.

His pneuma persisted, and it struck out against the viridian curtain as Urania reached out and traced a path through the stars.

Constellations that only he could see burned in the open air, each star a turning point in the Tyrant’s currents, each shining line a shift in pitch that he would have to adjust to. The Heavenly Muse could not teach him how to carry a tune- Scythas had learned that long ago.

But she could chart the notes, and guide him through the stars.

Scythas whistled against the hundred chimes and their hurricane winds, and just as they had all but beaten down his cloak of currents, had all but extinguished his heroic flames, the Tyrant’s song faltered. Urania pressed her free hand against his other cheek, eyes wide and intent as she bid him to follow her path.

He did, as he always had, and for a bare moment the song changed and Scythas took the hurricane in his hand. The viridian curtain whipped and flared, buffeted such that the other half of the room behind it was revealed for a fraction of a moment, the lounging form of a man too tall to be mortal, too perfectly sculpted.

The Hurricane Hierophant held out a hand just before the rising curtain revealed his face, and Scythas swallowed his whistle. The song ceased, every wind chime in the room fell still, and the curtain settled between them once more. Urania turned and pressed a kiss against Scythas’ temple before departing to wherever it was muses went, and silence fell in the elder’s chambers.

A single note of a tingling chime broke the frozen moment, emerald bells swaying behind the curtain. Aleuas chuckled, and Scythas felt it in his bones.

“Well done, boy. You’ve improved,” his mentor congratulated him. Scythas nodded mutely. “Only one note, to be sure, but a profound one. Have you been studying like I told you?”

He had not. Of course, he had tried, but in the days since they’d last met, when Scythas had been presenting him with a creature rooted out of the shadows, he hadn’t been able to focus even for a moment on the lessons that the Tyrant wanted him to learn. His mind had been elsewhere. In the stars, mostly.

“Yes sir,” he said, simply. Because the truth would be his end.

“Good, good,” Aleaus said, and then, slyly, “though I’m sure your fortuitous encounter deserves a portion of the credit too, hm?”

Scythas grit his teeth against the pressure. “As you say, sir.”

“So it is,” he mused. Then, as if he had just remembered, he said, “You know, that Solus has yet to grace my humble estate with his presence. You passed my invitation along, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You said he came from the Rosy Dawn. Fighting, what was it-?”

“Demons.”

“Demons, yes. On the western front.” The distant howl of his wrath betrayed the mild words, made the floor shake and the walls groan. “I spoke to old ‘Zalus after you left, the last time, to convey my thanks to him for keeping you safe. But it was the oddest thing. He said this Solus and his Young Griffon weren’t any men of his. And more than that, he denied any knowledge of any demons in the west.”

“And now,” he continued, his voice utterly calm in the way that preceded the storm, “my influence is under siege.  I am not the only one suffering, to be sure, but an unkindness equally shared is an unkindness nonetheless. What do you make of these creatures that haunt my shadows, Scythas?”

It was utterly mad to spite a Tyrant in his own domain, no matter what your standing among heaven and earth was. But there were some things that a man just couldn’t tolerate. For Scythas, the scavengers that stalked the Raging Heaven were one of those things.

“It seems to me, sir, that they're simply doing what Crows do. Scavenging and harassing. Making the world a darker place.”

The shadows behind the viridian curtain went still. Scythas wondered if he was about to die.

“Cannibalism,” Aleuas finally said, his voice weary and furious in equal measures. “You’ve made it clear what you think of how we old men conduct ourselves. Now step outside of that, and tell me: what sort of crow eats its own kind? Hunts them and no other?”

There was only one answer. “No crow at all.”

“Ravens,” he concluded, murder in his mouth. “Outsiders in our ranks. Two of them, just days after your fortuitous encounter. Would you call that a coincidence, Scythas?”

“I might.”

“You might,” he repeated. The pressure doubled and re-doubled. Scythas burned his heart’s blood and forced his head not to bow. He pursed his lips. Prepared a whistle.

Aleuas sighed and released him from his grip. “Whoever they are, find them. Bring them to me, dead or alive by any means necessary.”

“Sir…”

“Enough.”

Scythas’ teeth clacked together.

“You dislike these things that we do in the dark. Fine. I dislike them even more. But you have to understand the way of the world, boy. You have to understand how precarious our position is. All of our positions.

“We are all frozen in place. Each of us holds a knife in our teeth while the other seven press down upon it, and these gluttonous ravens have taken that opportunity to gouge my eyes out.”

Good, Scythas didn’t say. Once upon a time, when he was still a slayer of monsters and a champion of humanity, he would have shouted it.

“I understand, sir.”

“I knew you would. Be safe, boy, and be swift.” Scythas accepted the dismissal for what it was, standing and inclining his head before turning and walking back the way he’d come. As he passed through the outermost halls of the estate, Aleuas’ voice drifted to him on the wind. “And before you go, give my daughter a proper greeting, will you? She misses her fiancé.”

Slayer of monsters. Champion of humanity. Scythas hadn’t been that man in a very long time.

Perhaps he never had.

1.29

The Son of Rome

We parted ways after the immediate plans had been made for sundown, Griffon and Elissa heading back to the ruined residential streets while Jason and I made for the Raging Heaven.

For the most part, Jason was quiet. Every so often he would ask me a question that I had no desire to answer, and so I wouldn’t. Questions about the demons of Carthage, about the campaigns against them, and about my role in those campaigns. I had offered both of them as much of the truth as I could stand to tell. Eventually, he took my silence for what it was and subsided into solitary contemplation.

We passed through the gates of the Raging Heaven Cult unchallenged. Jason exchanged pleasantries with the men on guard, armored by bronze plates that clung to them like second skins, chiseled musculature carved into the metal itself. Their eyes followed me curiously, but they made no comment.

We were climbing the stone-carved steps up to the secondary levels where the respected initiates and future competitors kept quarters, when Jason finally asked the question he’d wanted to ask the whole time.

“These demons… They took something from you, didn’t they? Personally.”

I closed my eyes and quietly sighed.

“Would it matter if they did?”

“Of course it would!” he said, affronted.

“Why?”

“Why? Why? Because there’s a difference between doing what’s right for its own sake, and doing the right thing only if your heart demands it. What you’re planning here and now, would you do it even if your own feelings weren’t involved? Is it the right thing to do, or is it the right thing for you to do?”

Was I doing the right thing for the right reasons? Was my anger focused on the right thing, at the right time, to the right degree? I didn’t know. But Jason‘s life could depend on the answer.

“They took my city,” I finally said. “They took my wife.”

I’d told Anastasia. How could I not tell him?

Jason exhaled explosively. Overhead, the Storm That Never Ceased howled.

“I came here to compete in the Games, I wasn’t lying about that,” he said. I nodded, accepting that. “But the glory is secondary. The political influence, the money, it’s all nice. But that’s not why I’m here. That’s not why I have to win.”

I stopped, realizing that he’d fallen back three steps ago. He leaned against the stone face of the mountain, gazing up at the storm. I knew that look in his eyes.

“Have to?” I echoed. He nodded.

“I come from the Coast, Solus. I’m a sailor by breed. It’s what drives me, what’s always driven me, since I was a boy who couldn’t even tie a proper knot. It’s how I rose through the ranks of cultivation so quickly. I was born for the sea.”

“So why-”

“Why am I here? Up on this mountain, closer to heaven than high tide?” he asked bitterly. From the folds of his pale yellow and blue tunic he pulled a length of rope, and began tying it into knots.

Rome was never a maritime nation, and I’d never bothered to learn more than the bare basics of the naval arts. Watching Jason’s fingers nimbly fasten a dozen different knots in the span of a minute, each more complex than the last, I was struck by the absentmindedness of the motions. I fastened my armor the same way. With the surety of a thousand past experiences. Thoughtlessly.

His hands were shaking.

“When I turned twenty I was a captain of the Sophic Realm, captain of my own ship, and I decided to sail further south than I had ever ventured before. Against the warnings of my father. Against the heartfelt wishes of my mother. I was young, I was strong, and I was on the precipice of the realm of legend and myth. Every day, the wanderlust called out to me louder than before. And why not indulge it? I was invincible on the open sea, with my sworn brothers and sisters beside me.”

I reached out and gently took the rope out of his hands. It was a ruined ball of knots and strangled threads. Jason pressed shaking hands to his forehead, his eyes distant. Ocean blue flames flickered.

“Monsters in the shape of men,” he said, with as much reluctance as I had. “Demonic cultivators. We never found that far flung shore. But something found us.

“Maybe Griffon is right. A few years ago, I would have been the first to agree with him. All the world's greatest heroes are and have always been audacious souls. That much is undeniable.” His jaw clenched. “But that doesn’t mean that every audacious man becomes a great hero.

“I was audacious once,” he said, a quiet admission, and an even quieter entreaty to me. “That’s why I’m here. Those waves doused me. I seek the Olympic flame, because it’s the only thing I know won’t ever stop burning, won’t ever go out… And I’d rather die than sail again.”

“So die.”

Blazing blue eyes snapped up to meet mine, too shocked to be offended. So, this was what it was like from the outside looking in. How pitiful.

“They took your crew from you,” I said. Declared it, because I could already tell. “They took your closest friends, and they should have taken you. But they didn’t. And you ascended, even so.”

Jason stared at me.

“The heavens are never fair,” I said furiously, reciting the words of my first mentor. “Justice is the responsibility of mortal men. What happened to your crew, was that justice? Did they deserve what was done to them?”

The rage that came over his face at the mere suggestion was answer enough.

“Do they deserve justice?” I pressed. Watched that fury turn inward, upon himself. That familiar loathing. How fucking pitiful. “Do they deserve to rot at the bottom of the heartless sea, forgotten and unavenged?”

“No.”

“No to what? Justice, or oblivion?”

Jason slammed a clenched fist against the mountain behind him, and the amethyst veins of jewels running through its stone face flashed bright as the sun for a moment before fading to their usual lustre.

“No! They don’t deserve what I lead them into! They don’t deserve what happened to them, what should have happened to me. The captain is supposed to go down with his ship!”

A captain leads from the front, I spoke to him in the voice of my soul, and his eyes flew wide open.

“You-”

“We are who we are,” I told him, my own resolve hardening with every word. Some things were just too painful to accept unless they were staring you in the face, and some of those things didn’t show up in a mirror’s reflection. They could only be seen in others. “What we want is inconsequential. What we fear is even less so. Until we’ve burnt our enemies to ashes and salted what remains, how can we do anything but keep moving forward?”

“You…” he said again, “you’re not like Griffon at all, are you?”

I smiled mirthlessly. “Griffon pursues the heights because they’re what he’s always desired. I pursue them because there’s no other way.”

Jason… snorted. He shook his head, and he chuckled. It was a bleak, hopeless sound, but his hand no longer shook as it covered his face. “Of course you do. Of course you do. Heroes chase their passions until they have nothing left. But men like you…”

The Hero of the Coast straightened and clapped his hands together, the sound booming. His expression turned fierce. “Fine then! I understand! For as long as you’ll have me, until I meet my story’s end, I’ll stand with you against the night. This lowly sophist offers his greetings to the master.”

I stared at the legendary Hero and former pirate captain.

“I don’t know what you did last night, but I know those old men wouldn’t have sent just one Crow after me, especially one that weak,” he explained, inclining his head respectfully. “Including the night of the funeral, I owe you my life twice over. And now I owe you my heart, too, for showing me that I’m not alone. That even men like you can suffer the consequences of hubris. So I’ll repay you however I can. Until the scales are balanced and for as long as you need me, I’ll stand faithfully by your side.”

The soft applause of a solitary spectator saved me from having to respond to that. I looked back down the mountain path and saw a familiar face, inviting dark features and burning green eyes. Anastasia smiled deviously as she ascended the steps behind us, clapping all the while.

“A moment like that belongs on a stage,” she said when she’d drawn close enough to tease, with laughter in her eyes. “I wonder, will Griffon be jealous? He doesn’t strike me as the sharing type.”

“Good morning, Anastasia,” I sighed. “Jason-”

When I turned back, I saw him sprinting up the steps, already halfway up the mountain. Faithfully by my side, eh?

“I have that effect at times,” Anastasia admitted without regret.

I rolled my eyes and gestured for her to walk with me. “Do you have anything for me?” I asked quietly, beneath the cover of thunder.

“I think I might,” she hedged, procuring her javelin and twirling it as she walked. “But in exchange, I want the truth.”

I glanced at her and her whirling javelin, silent. Her eyes danced.

“You’ve been hunting, haven’t you, Solus?”

“I have.”

“And you haven’t invited me once,” she said with utter despair. “After all we’ve been through, and all that I’ve done for you since that tender bath we shared-”

My influence flicked against hers and she abruptly giggled.

“This isn’t a game,” I said, as if I was her elder in anything at all.

“Of course not.” Her smile grew. “But I still want to play.”

S

As crows flew freely through the Raging Heaven Cul, searching for the hungry ravens that had been devouring their fellows, four Heroic cultivators were stolen from beneath their sheets. They each resisted, but only for a moment.

All of them had known what to expect, and even so, they were unnerved.

“You said you were hunting the crows,” Elissa said, voice hushed and accusing as she knelt beside her peers in the light of the moon. She watched mistrustfully as the raven on the right paced around them, unfastening coils of iron thread from their wrists and pulling dark hoods from their heads.

“We are,” spoke the raven on the left. Distant and unsettling.

“Could have fooled me,” Kyno murmured, rubbing at his wrists. “If it looks like a crow, and it talks like a crow-”

“It’s a raven.”

“It’s not a bad look on you,” Anastasia mused, tilting her head as she regarded both ravens. Smoldering green eyes trailed along the crimson lines of the bare-chested shadow’s tattoos, and the eerily undulating cloak of his partner. “Not at all in line with a proper crow’s uniform. I like it.”

“So you’ve put us through the song and dance,” Jason muttered, edging away from Anastasia once his hood was pulled free. “What’s next? Going to put us through the rites?”

“Something like that.”

That said, each of the hungry ravens reached into their shadows. Four Heroic cultivators watched, wide eyed, as their arms plunged into the ether, and pulled from it tunics and hoods of midnight cloth and weapons of burnished bronze.

“I didn’t know crows could do that,” Jason whispered.

Kyno frowned. “They can’t.”

The Heroines each reached for a weapon presented by murky pankration hands, and the Heroes hurriedly followed suit. Four Heroic cultivators and two hungry ravens gathered beneath the light of the rising moon. In the distance, an eagle cried.

“After you,” the caustic crow invited.

The hunt began.

1.28

The Young Griffon

As a child grew old in body and soul, walking that crucial transitory bridge between adolescence and adulthood, the first iteration of their identity finally cemented itself. In those formative years a human being laid the foundation for who they would be in their highest highs and lowest lows. Just as the bridges between realms were the most crucial for a cultivator’s development, so too were those formative years critical for the mundane growth that every human being experienced.

Body and soul. The body’s growth was self-evident. Bone and muscle grew into their adult frames, cherubic faces turned lean and angular. Human beings were made in the image of the divine. It simply took time for our worthless clay selves to take the proper shape.

The soul’s growth was less easily observed. In my formative years the development of my body had seen to itself. I’d chiseled it from marble a little more each day, testing myself against all that would stand and fight me. Progress could be measured in practical terms. It could be seen in the definition of my body. But my soul’s development was not so straightforward.

Reason, spirit, and hunger. It was no easy thing for a lion to grow old in a cage. Perhaps a wild childhood wouldn’t have been any better for me, but I doubted it. Growing up within the sterile halls of the Rosy Dawn estates, I had no choice but to refine my burgeoning soul through abstraction. Adventures half-lived through others. Tribulations that I could not undergo myself, lessons that I had not personally suffered in order to learn.

It wasn’t ideal, but I made do with what I was given, as I always had. Just as I chiseled my body from marble, so too did I forge my soul from purest gold. I created myself in the image of those who came before me. I devoured stories of Heroes and Tyrants, drew from them the principles of a virtuous life, and with each and every one the flames of my spirit were fanned higher.

I understood the anatomy of an epic better than most. A story worth telling. For each and every one, the beginning was always the same. Even the Muses needed someone to sing of - before the vile monsters, before the triumphs and the tragedies, you had to prepare your audience for what was to come.

You had to set the stage.

“You say you’re from the Rosy Dawn,” Elissa said, not hesitating to question me. She stepped closer, shoulder to shoulder with Sol, and lowered her voice so that no one else in the agora could overhear. “The Raging Heaven Cult hasn’t seen a fresh face from across the Ionian in nearly two decades. I checked. What’s changed?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Aside from the obvious?”

The Heroine took that about how I expected her to. Beside me on the lip of the odd fountain of rising water, Jason cursed under his breath.

The death of the kyrios still hung, like a funeral shroud, over every interaction within the Half-Step City. Reconstruction efforts could be seen on every residential street, the Tyrant’s last gasp putting countless families out of their homes. There was a profound grief, a bleak pessimism, that permeated every interaction if you looked close enough. It was only natural that our Heroic friends would think first of his passing upon hearing such a suggestive question.

After all, what were the odds that Sol and I had just happened to set sail for Olympia on the day of the kyrios’ passing? Long odds indeed.

“You said that Sol was fighting demons on the western front,” Jason said, choosing to set aside that particular suspicion for the moment. The Hero that Sol had snatched back from the shadows looked searchingly at him. “How far west? And what sort of demons?”

Sol stared at him in silence. That storm flashed in his eyes, his influence lashing out in every direction. It was an unconscious reaction, I knew, but they didn’t. Both Heroic cultivators visibly tensed. Jason set his jaw and leaned forward.

“If you want me to follow you, I have to know where we’re going. And I deserve to know who’s leading me there. Who are you, Solus?”

For a long moment, even I wasn’t sure what he’d say. I wouldn’t lie for any existence on this earth, not even him, but I wouldn’t force him to tell the truth either.

Thankfully, he chose to do so himself. My brother, for all his traumas, was no coward

“There are demons in the city of Carthage. Wolves in the shape of men. They walk on two legs and fight with arms and armor, and they can cultivate. A year and a half ago they consumed the city of Rome. In another year and a half, they’ll have consumed everything west of the Scarlet City.”

Elissa was immediately skeptical. Jason, on the other hand - I saw the sudden fear in his eyes, and the rage, before he overcame both and hid them from view. Ho?

“Monsters of that caliber, in those numbers, and the Scarlet City didn’t see fit to warn her sister cities?” Elissa asked.

“When’s the last time the colonies told us anything?” Jason responded. Elissa inclined her head grudgingly. He continued, almost hopefully, “But if this wasn’t enough for Damon Aetos to break his silence, then he must not consider it a threat to those of us east of the Ionian. Toppling a few barbarian nations is one thing. But a free city-state built by the children of Helen? A monster’s primitive approximation of cultivation simply can’t compare. They’re only wolves.”

Sol’s influence rippled.

“You’ve made two assumptions, just now,” I informed the Hero, before my brother snapped. I glanced Elissa’s way. “Both of you.”

Jason frowned. “Enlighten me.”

Gladly. “You asked why the Scarlet City hasn’t sent word of the coming threat,” I said first, savoring their realization. I gestured lazily. “And yet here we are.”

“And the second?” Elissa pressed.

“You assumed that when I said the demons of Carthage could cultivate, I was exaggerating. You decided that I was referring to the unrefined strength of monsters and animals.” Sol said coldly. “I wasn’t.”

Silence.

“Something like that,” Elissa finally whispered. She was unable to vocalize the rest.

“If that’s the case,” Jason picked up for her in a strangled tone, “Why are you telling us here, like this? Why not… someone…”

I chuckled. “In power?”

Elissa’s knuckles were white around the hilt of her blade. “Enough games. What are you here for?”

What could I do but tell them the truth?

“A good time.”

My virtuous heart would accept nothing less.

“You really are mad,” Jason said wonderingly.

My eyes rolled. Always the same. “Of course I am. What sane man looks upon all the gods have given us, all the bounties of nature and its earthly pleasures, and decides that they are not enough? What is a cultivator if not a madman? Where I come from, we don’t make any excuses for our behavior.”

I tilted my head to face Sol’s little legionaire, so small in spirit despite the grandeur of his soul. How was it that a Hero, the subject of an epic all his own, could be so pathetic in the face of overwhelming danger?

“Until death or divinity, while those who came before us plummet to the earth on melted wax wings, we are all flying perilously into the sun. What could possibly be more insane than that?”

I’d felt the same instinctive revulsion when I saw Alazon turn tail and run from Sol in that club, only moments after he’d so confidently staked his claim on the place and all those within it. Another Hero. Another shining soul acknowledged by both the Muses and the Fates. Another coward. How dare he lay claim to the same heights as Nikolas and the greats? How dare these Heroic cultivators cringe away from the wrath of Tyrants, when liberation was their central creed?

How dare they act weak when they were strong?

“The two of you aren’t who you are by mistake,” Sol said. They latched onto his quiet intent like a lifeline, making the unfortunate assumption that he was the saner of the two of us. “You each have something that drives you forward in the face of adversity. Something that even tribulation, heaven’s lightning wrath, could not take from you. A Tyrant’s retribution is nothing compared to that. Is that not so?”

Both Hero and Heroine nodded.

“For us, this is one of those things. The free Mediterranean is meant to be a paragon of enlightened virtue. The city of Olympia is meant to be the jewel in that crown. And yet, I’ve walked the steps of your mountain cult, chased the shadows down your halls, and seen such acts of wicked vice that it would make your kyrios weep if he was still alive to see them.”

“After twenty years the rosy fingers of dawn have stretched themselves across the Ionian Sea once more, and what is the first thing they’ve found?” I asked quietly, adding my weight to Sol’s subtle rhetoric. “Injustice.”

“There are certain injustices in this life that a hero won’t ever stand for, is that not so?” Sol asked. Slowly, reluctantly, both nodded again. Sol considered them both for a long moment. Then, almost gently, he said, “This is one of them.”

Jason shook his head. “This sort of thing… I know what I said before. And I do want to help. What you’re trying to do… it’s righteous. It’s heroic!”

Elissa sighed and finished his thought. “But most tragedies are at the start.”

The mask of my tribulation burned on my hip, opposite my uncle's sword.

“What about you two?” I asked.

“Us?”

“There is no us,” Elissa said shortly.

I waved an impatient hand. “Yes, yes, I get it, you aren’t friends. I’m asking what it is that makes the two of you tick. Where is your line in the sand? What are you here for?”

The two heroic cultivators shared a look. The heroine with her scars answered for both of them again.

“We’re here to compete.”

“We haven’t lied to you,” Sol said. The message was clear. Don’t lie to us.

“It’s true,” Jason insisted. “We’re here for the Olympic Games. All of us are here looking for glory.”

“Just because something is not a lie doesn’t make it fully true,” I said, ignoring the look that Sol shot at me. “Allow me to refine the question, then. Why are you here to compete? What is it you hope to find in a laurel leaf crown?”

“What are you running from?” Sol asked.

Enlightened thinkers placed such emphasis on cultivation, on the quantification of the soul, that we often forgot even the greatest among us were made of the same flesh and blood as the least. They had the same minds, the same hearts and desires. A Hero could be swayed as easily as a Citizen, as easily as a mortal, even, under the proper conditions.

Sol and I struck out with our rhetoric in the most mundane sense, both of us from different angles, and in that moment two Heroic cultivators faltered. I knew it as soon as I saw the first stone fall within them. Sol saw it too, I was sure. We had them.

We were all here for our own reasons, true enough. But there was a thread that connected us all, and Sol and I had pulled it taut around their throats.

“… Say that you succeed in this,” Elissa finally said. “And say that we help you declaw the cats’ paws. What have we accomplished, then, aside from angering greater powers?”

“Take away their shadows and they’ll have nothing left but the light,” I answered simply. “They want to fight for the title of kyrios? So be it. Let them fight like men, without proxies, and to the strongest goes the crown.”

“The strongest fighter,” Jason realized. “The strongest leader of men. Not necessarily the strongest politician.”

“In times of peace, a good politician is a great thing,” I agreed.

“But in times of war…” Elissa half-recited, frustration clear in her bearing. Remembering some past lesson, and hating the fact that it rang true. “What then? You’ll force the issue? How will you ensure that the… proper candidate…”

Jason and Elissa both looked at Sol.

What could we, two mysterious cultivators with no established spheres of influence, have to gain from orchestrating such a conflict? In a conflict between Tyrants, it was self-evident that only a Tyrant could possibly emerge victorious. So what were we playing at? The audacious young competitor and his master of unspecified power?

In that moment, they teetered on the edge of an utterly outrageous assumption. Unwilling to believe it, but unable to fully dismiss it either.

I smiled secretively, leaning in. “The privileges of an Olympic Champion are surely grand, I won’t deny it. But it’s not often the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult owes you a favor.” In the end, even Heroic cultivators were still just that. Cultivators.

And cultivators, at their core, were entirely selfish existences.

Sol and I reached out and pulled them up onto the stage.

1.27

The Son of Rome

Griffon and I made our rounds through the streets of Olympia, seeing what there was to see and balancing political intrigue with simple curiosity. The Half-Step City reminded me of Rome in many ways, more than Alikos had. The people, visibly gathered from all over the continent. The energy of ambition, felt in every conversation. And most of all, the tongues spoken.

My mentor had taught me the Alikoan dialect well. I hadn’t had much use for it in the legions, but my time as a slave had seen my grasp on it perfected. But that was only one language. There were dozens of tongues being spoken in the Half-Step City, at least three at any given time on any given street. It was fascinating and disorienting in equal measure. I had grown used to hearing everything there was to be heard years ago, one of many skills that Gaius had hammered into me. That awareness worked against me now, made it hard to think straight.

It would’ve been hard to focus regardless. What conversation I could understand was conducted at blistering paces, about topics of politics and law that I had no frame of reference for as a foreigner. Children laughed and shrieked, running about naked or in simple genderless tunics. Figs, grapes, turnips, pears, apples, honeycombs, chickpeas, and myrtle berries abounded. Periodically, Griffon would snatch a handful of something or other with a pankration hand while the Metic selling it wasn’t looking. Occasionally, he even offered me some.

The fruits were all unbelievably sweet, decadent beyond belief. In general, that was probably how I would describe this place. With its grand public buildings and massive, riotous agora.

And that was before Kaukoso Mons, the gemstone-lined mountain that served as a monument to all of man’s excesses.

I would give the Greeks one thing. In their virtues and their vices, they held nothing back.

“Well, this is my stop,” Griffon suddenly said, no doubt alighting on something that deserved an extended amount of his obnoxious attention. I caught him by the arm before he could fully step away. The laurel leaf crown wrapped around his bicep was curiously warm to the touch.

“Not yet,” I told him, glancing meaningfully towards the greater mayhem of the agora. “We’ve been traveling side streets for the most part, just in case.” Griffon raised an eyebrow.

“Ho, is that what last night was about?”

“What do you think?”

Griffon smirked and pulled his arm free. “Fine then, give me a moment.” That said, he turned and walked confidently into a residential building with no defining characteristics that I could see. It was a squat, almost ugly thing compared to the splendor of the public constructions.

I closed my eyes and focused on breathing while he did whatever it was he was doing. Counting today, it had been four days since I slept. Three days since Griffon and I had met at the eighth wonder of the world and consumed the starlight marrow of a crow.

Sleep was something that a cultivator of sufficient advancement didn’t really need, and it was something that a soldier of sufficient rank couldn’t really afford. I was out of practice, ironically, my days as a slave having been far more restful than my time in the legions, but some things were never truly forgotten. If anything, my advancement… at the end, had made it even easier to keep moving with the sun and the moon. The marrow helped as well, in a nebulously unsettling way that I still hadn’t pinned down.

But even so, the mind needed a moment from time to time. Or at least mine did. I focused on breathing in the steady rhythm of a proper cadence, allowing my plans, my doubts, and my fears slip away for just a moment as I unwound.

Griffon wasted no time ruining my short peace, leaping off the second story terrace of the unassuming home with pankration hands blazing around him.

I inhaled sharply, calling the captains virtue to my hand as I expanded my senses through the building looking for the threat.

I found it at the same moment that a wooden dining table came hurtling out of the building after Griffon, and I relaxed. The former young aristocrat deflected the projectile furniture with his violent intent and landed adroitly behind me, leaning back to back with his elbow propped up on my shoulder

“Give me a hand, won’t you?”

“You have enough,” I said flatly. He clicked his tongue, utterly unashamed of himself.

The scarred Heroine, Elissa, slammed open the door on the first floor, murder in her desert heat eyes. They went first to Griffon, seething annoyance in them that I fully empathized with, before settling on me. The Heroine sighed explosively and nodded a greeting.

“Solus. This lowly sophist would like to offer your student guidance.”

A pankration hand dug its middle and index finger into the small of my back, the heat of the Rosy Dawn’s flames growing steadily hotter.

“I can think of nothing better for his development,” I said, and was promptly jabbed by several more burning fingers. “Unfortunately, we have somewhere to be.”

Elissa scowled fully, resting a hand on the bronze blade at her hip. She wasn’t wearing her usual cult attire, I realized. She wasn’t even wearing the finery of a normal citizen of Olympia. She was dressed like a Metic, in drab white cloth with only a sash around her waist that held her sword, and a necklace of simple iron thread around her neck. She looked about as unassuming as a cultivator of her standing possibly could.

“So you come into my home, drink my wine, just to ruin my day?”

I glanced back at Griffon. He shrugged.

“I thought you might like to join us”

“Why would I-” Elissa stopped short, looking at me closer. Warily. Her eyes flickered up and down the street and all its people. “Now?”

Griffon smiled pleasantly at her over his shoulder. “Would you rather wait until dinner?”

The Heroine snarled a curse.

S

We found Jason sitting on the lip of a fountain that was as wide around as the entire bathhouse that Griffon and I had made use of earlier that morning. It wasn’t a fountain in the same sense that Rome had fountains. It was not acts of engineering that made this water flow.

The water within the fountain simply fell up. It streamed into the air as if the whole world was upside down, and the sky above was as the ground beneath our feet. Past a certain point, some forty feet in the air, those streams spiraled out in every direction and suddenly returned to normalcy, falling back into the pool below. It made for a dazzling sight.

And it also obscured everyone on the other side of the fountain from sight. The sound of rushing water obscured most small sounds. For all that Jason was lounging with a young woman at his side at ease with the world, chatting pleasantly, he had chosen his spot with care.

He noticed me shortly after I noticed him, his expression lighting up in a more genuine sense. Without looking, he placed a hand on the face of the woman beside him and pushed her back into the fountain. She shrieked as the odd currents of the structure carried her away.

“Solus,” he called, raising that same hand and greeting. Then his eyes slipped past me and noticed who I had brought with me and all that excitement fell away.

“You.”

“Him?” I asked, glancing back at Griffon.

“Me,” he agreed.

“Not him,” Jason said, waving impatiently. “Her. What is she doing here?”

Elissa stepped past us both, eyes burning with contempt as she looked down on her fellow Hero. “I was invited. What are you doing here, craven?”

Jason didn’t react physically, but his pneuma blazed around him, nearly a visible thing. He’d chosen a nice, secluded area of the agora, hiding in plain sight, but I suppose it was inevitable that no Greek could keep quiet for long.

“He’s meeting me,” I said, flexing the captain’s intent. Somehow, maddeningly, that was enough for them to break eye contact and subside. Elissa stepped back and crossed her arms.

“Did you have to bring her?” Jason asked me, grimacing. I glanced back at Griffon, and saw the certainty and the quirk of his lips.

“She’s involved.” I chose to stand while Griffon sprawled across the stone lip of the fountain and dipped his hand into it, watching with interest the rivulets of water that streamed in odd ways through his fingers. “Would you have preferred Anastasia?”

Jason‘s grimace deepened.

“Fine,” he said at length. “And as long as she pulls her weight.” Elissa scoffed, but made no comment.

“So, we have our merry band of insurrectionists,” Griffon mused, visibly relishing in the discomfort those words caused the two Heroic cultivators. “All we’re missing now is a king to kill. Which one first, you think?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Jason snarled.

“Likely,” he said easily

“Acting is one thing,” Elissa said, just as tense as her fellow Hero but less shocked by Griffon's words. “But there’s audacity, and then there’s stupidity. I know you know the difference.”

Griffon inclined his head, raising a cupped palm of water out of the fountain and overturning it. The water fell up through his fingers and around the sides of his palm. He smiled as he considered it.

“There are several deaths a cultivator can suffer,” he said, twisting his fingers around the rising strands of water. “A Tyrant especially. The body may die, yes, and so may the soul. But the death of a man’s ego is no less severe, nor the death of his curiosity, his spirit, his hunger.”

“His influence,” I finished, and Griffon’s smile turned to a vicious smirk.

Elissa frowned. “How could you possibly undermine… one of them? They’ve had decades, centuries to establish their domains. Each and everyone has a city’s full backing.”

“The crows,” Jason said, his eyes widening with realization. He looked at me with mingled trepidation and anticipation. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

I consider the question. What he was suggesting, what Griffon had led him into thinking was my plan, was a line that could not be uncrossed. Spitting in a Tyrant's face like that, undermining their reach no matter how indirectly, that was the sort of thing that we had crucified man for in Gaius’ lesions. It was a mad, unnecessary thing

And yet. I took a breath, as I had taken a breath before while Griffon was antagonizing Elissa. As I had taken every breath since consuming that starlight marrow, and I traced my pneuma as it flowed through entirely new paths in my body. I felt stronger today than I had ever before in my life. I had felt the same way yesterday, and the day before. Each night since that assault in the Father’s temple, Griffon and I had hunted crows and sucked the marrow from their bones. And each time, it had made us stronger than before.

I still hadn’t found a trace of my mentor, or anyone that could speak of him with any knowledge or authority. Anastasia, if she had found anything, had yet to seek me out and tell me. The Greek ways of cultivation were as opaque as ever, the Roman ways closed off to me.

As things stood…

“It is,” I answered Jason’s breathless question. I would continue to live this life, the same lie that I had forced to be true the night of the Kyrios’ funeral. “The Raging Heaven is in no rush to answer the question of succession, that much seems clear. In the meantime the mystikos are suffering. Children are being coaxed into opposing factions. Men and women huddle together in the light of day, too afraid of the dark to leave their rooms at night.”

“Sol isn’t a fan of politics,” Griffon confided to the two Heroic cultivators. I sighed and forced my fists to unclench.

“Men worry more about what they can’t see than what they can,” I said tiredly. “If they want to posture, fine. But I have no patience for scavengers.”

Jason and Elissa both considered me silently, with clear confliction. The dull roar of the fountain and general tumult of thousands of people streaming through the agora was all that could be heard for a long minute.

“Who are you, really?” Elissa asked, finally. “Who are you that you think this is something you have to do?”

“On that night, at the club,” Jason said, nearly inaudible beneath the surrounding noise. He tilted his head at Griffon beside him. “He said you came here from the west for a bit of culture. Where are you from, Solus?”

And why are you here, he didn’t ask. But I heard it nonetheless.

I considered them both, and Griffon besides. There was a part of me, a large part, that wanted to take it all back, to cut my losses and make good on what I had said on the Eos. Leave Griffon to his mad adventures and find my mentor, gather what strength I could and return to the ashes of Rome. Take down as many of those godforsaken dogs as I could before my body succumbed.

There was another part of me - smaller, but far more insistent - that said some things just weren’t worth tolerating. No matter whose country this was. No matter how long I had been here.

For all of the lives the legions of the Republic had taken, for all the atrocities her soldiers had committed, that part of me still believed in the core conceit of the Republic. That where all sons of Rome went, they spread the light of righteous civilization. The ideal of the soldier within me had long lost its patience for traders and back stabbers.

The Raging Heaven Cult wasn’t my place. But I had doomed myself nonetheless by extending a hand to Scythas. By saving Jason. By sharing a bath with Anastasia. By drinking with all of them, playing dice and trading discourse. I couldn’t think of them as faceless Greeks anymore. And if I had to acknowledge them, I had to acknowledge the rest. The children that Jason was doing his best to save in the small moments. The innocents in the cult, suffering the consequences of their elders’ greed.

I knew all too well what happened when Tyrants clashed.

“I’ve lived this conflict before,” I said, resigning myself to what inevitably came next. Griffon hummed in satisfaction. “When men like these cross swords, there’s only one way it can end. Succession through a proxy victory in the Olympic Games is a fantasy. Men like this are who they are because when they want something, they take it.”

Jason and Elissa shared a look, without malice for one another. With mutual unease.

“You’ve lived it,” Jason repeated. “Where? With who?”

“We don’t know anything about either of you. Not really,” Elissa said, but her suspicion was tempered by a careful consideration as she spoke to me. “And you don’t know me.”

“Or me,” Jason said reluctantly.

“A fair concern,” Griffon allowed, propping his head up on one hand. His scarlet eyes glittered. “What do you want to know?”

1.26

The Young Griffon

“Ho, so the young aristocrat slipped away from punishment after all,” I mused, walking through the streets of Olympia. “Leaving his subordinates to suffer the full consequences. How surprising.” The markets were stirring to full wakefulness as the dawn broke, society’s undesirables crawling back to their shadows.

For our parts, Sol and I had changed back into our daywear after a thorough cleansing at one of the city’s many public baths. The streets of Olympia were like home in many ways – at least, like home during its heights. Each day here was a festival by the standards of the Scarlet City, every street overflowing with enterprising merchants, ratty musicians playing sweet songs for children and couples, and of course, men both young and old hotly debating politics at every street corner.

Each street was a new experience, and that alone was worth the trip up and down Kaukoso Mons.

“With all the problems these Tyrants pose, they could at least do their jobs,” Sol said darkly, tossing an apple in his hand as he perused a merchant’s wares. His nose twitched, and he absently brushed a thumb across it. “Favored by one should mean reviled by seven.”

“That would make too much sense.” I clicked my tongue, thinking of all the worthless sophists that languished beneath the Storm That Never Ceased. Ever too fearful of a Tyrant’s reprisal to fully test their limits. Abruptly, I wondered how many initiates of the Raging Heaven had actually suffered an elder’s wrath, and not just the threat of it.

“Power and its privileges…” Sol took a bite out of his apple, dismissing the merchant and turning down the road. “Alazon was a Hero, I remember that much. Strong enough to confidently challenge three peers and an unknown cultivator with only one other Hero and a handful of Philosophers at his back. Well-connected enough to do it in the middle of a club.”

“He was a real asshole,” I agreed. Gray eyes flickered my way.

“I was going to say he reminded me of you.”

“What a coincidence,” I said pleasantly, tilting my head towards an old vagrant bundled in filthy rags, sitting vacantly on a street corner while men stood around him arguing over the next assembly’s vote. “I was just about to say the same of him.” Sol snorted and took two more bites of his apple before flicking the core at my head.

“At any rate, it’s safe to assume he has friends in high places,” I continued, catching the core and dropping it for one of the many dogs skulking the streets in search of scraps. “­I’m sure he’ll come back to haunt us sooner or later. More importantly, how was the lecture itself? Insightful?”

“The first number, éna, is the origin of all things,” Sol recited dully, slapping a boy’s hand away from an oblivious citizen’s coin pouch. The boy scowled in outrage, saw his indigo attire, and promptly took off running down a side alley. “The second, thio, is the feminine principle. Third, tria, masculinity. Fourth-”

“Tessera.” I snapped my fingers and the light of dawn rose to the tip of my thumb and caught fire. “Perfect natural symmetry. Justice.” Sol hummed in agreement. “The wise philosopher had a larger point to make, surely? Even Romans can count to four.”

Sol ticked off three fingers and then paused, his brow furrowing. I chuckled and threw an arm over his shoulder, gesturing widely with the other into the distance. Beyond the eastern limit of Olympia was a vast expanse of unconquered life, stark mountains and lush valleys that could be seen sprawling into the far horizon.

“There is purpose in all things, young sophist,” I said grandly. “From their placement to their posture, the organization of them and their component parts, how they proliferate and how they cease to be. Natural philosophers are those that dedicate their lives to unearthing these purposes and advancing humanity’s fundamental understanding of creation. Surely a man of that caliber is competent enough to teach multiple lessons with only one lecture – one for the children, one for the students, and one for the scholars.”

Sol started to raise his fourth finger, hesitated, and lowered it again. I grabbed the bent finger and forced it to fully extend. His eyes widened.

“You’re not funny,” I informed him.

“And neither are you,” he said easily, brushing my arm off his shoulder. “­­­­­It did feel like he was building towards a greater point, admittedly. He referenced past lectures a few times as well. It felt nearly like a tangent.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said. “Past a certain point of advancement, even the simplest techniques are the culmination of countless smaller pursuits.”

“How so?”

“Consider the man that taught you your virtue,” I said. “Picture in your mind’s eye the greatest feats that he accomplished with that same virtue, and now imagine how you would recreate them.” I gave him a moment, just long enough not to lose himself. Then I prompted him, “Now do it.”

“I can’t,” he admitted. He clenched and unclenched his hands, a considering look in his eyes. “But not for the same reasons that you can’t copy your father.”

I flicked the lingering flame from my thumb and briefly weighed the odds of me successfully pulling down a star from heaven.

Not today. Tomorrow, maybe.

“Humor me, then,” I said. “Every Hero and every Tyrant was once a Philosopher. To progress past the Sophic Realm a cultivator must internalize a thousand-thousand truths, the rules of nature that will serve as the framework for their cultivation going forward.

“When a Hero stands against a terrible horror and strikes it down with a sword made of iron, every truth of the world as they know it is behind that swing. It’s more than just a flick of the wrist. When a Tyrant decides he has no more use for a mountain and it suddenly ceases to be?” I flicked my hand back the way we’d come, in the direction Kaukoso Mons and its storm crown, but we both knew I was referring to the Rosy Dawn’s initiation rites. “The same principle applies. Now tell me, Sol, how does Rome differ?”

I was honestly curious. My understanding of the Roman system of cultivation was even less developed than his understanding of ours. I had only ever heard disparaging speculation from Alikoans, and stray comments from Sol himself made during idle conversation. I waited patiently while he considered the scenario, eyes drifting back to the home of the Raging Heaven Cult.

Finally, he said, “A Hero cuts down a great enemy with one strike. But that one strike is the product of a thousand-thousand truths.” Storm gray eyes flickered to me seeking confirmation, and I nodded. “So then, if a Hero can swing a blade with the same force as a thousand-thousand men, it’s fair to say that each one of those truths represent a single swinging blade. A Tyrant is the same, but on a larger scale.”

“For the most part,” I agreed.

“One Greek arms himself with the rules of nature and uses them to do the work of many. A Hero swings a sword like he’s a thousand-thousand men layered over one another in a single skin and smites the monster. A Tyrant presses down on a mountain like he’s a million-million men and crushes it to dust.”

“And what does the Roman do to strike down the monster?” I asked, intrigued. “How does he topple the mountain that’s in his path?”

Sol hummed, remembering, and the riptide currents of his influence whipped out around him, buffeting me and those around us. I let it wash over me, but a pair of women walking towards us suddenly stumbled towards him, dropping the bundles of food in their arms. He arrested their fall with the captain’s virtue and we walked on without breaking stride.

Finally, he smiled wryly.

“The Roman tells five hundred good men to go to work, and the monster falls to the prime cohort’s fury.”

“And what about the mountain?” I asked, amused.

“What about the mountain?”

“How would you topple it?”

Sol shrugged. “I wouldn’t.”

I nearly objected. It was a terrible response, and worse than that, it didn’t tell me anything about the Roman cultural zeitgeist. I opened my mouth to say that, in admittedly less polite words, and then I paused. Closed it. On the surface, both answers said nothing at all about cultivation. There was strength in numbers, that was common sense. And yes, rather than do something, it was also possible to not do it instead. Profound insight-

I sighed. “You’d go around it.”

“I’d go around it.”

The literal answer, the tactical answer, and the strategic answer. I supposed that was what I deserved for bringing up the logistics of lecture in the first place. I filed my new insight into the military mentality of a Roman cultivator away for later consideration. And then I spat at his feet.

“You could have just said you’re boring,” I said sourly. Sol nodded, simple satisfaction in the quirk of his lips.

“And you could have just said you’re Greek.”