sunslammers

1.138

The Young Griffon

Violence told a story. This I’d known for my entire life. My time outside the Rosy Dawn had challenged countless other preconceptions, but this one it had only reinforced. It was only in the heat of our most violent moments that we bared our hearts to one another in full. Not because we desired it, necessarily, but because we had no other choice. Every day of my life had hammered that point deeper home. Even this day. Especially this day.

We exchanged discourse with our broken Heroes while the Sanctuary City fell, and that violence told their stories.

Sol seized the opening initiative while I was grandstanding, waving a dismissive hand when all five rose up to oppose us. The golden flames spilling out of his eyes, a perfect match to my own, flared in response to his sacrifice of empowering blood. Gravitas flung them all back, tearing up the earth beneath their feet and shifting the clouds above their heads.

They recovered quickly, each by their own means, but the pace was ours to set. We pursued them and were there the instant they escaped the current.

Elissa separated her spirit from her body again, and now with the King's Curse in my hand I could see the shimmer of her muse plucking the resonant cord. I pivoted in the middle of a full sprint the moment that I felt it, burning my heart's blood to give my body the alacrity needed to catch her. My blade swept sideways through her path, forcing her to raise her own bronze sword in a frantic block.

When the bronze edge of her weapon passed through the burning sheathe of heart flame I’d forged around my own, clashing fully edge-against-edge, the King’s Curse seized upon her and delivered a portion of her soul to me in even greater clarity than its blanket perceptions could provide.

[-the guqin has seven strings-]

The Sword Song had moved to parry this time, diverting as much force as she could away from her blade - she only lost a sliver of its edge this time. Her muse plucked another string while I was processing that crystalline moment, and Elissa’s spirit vanished. It appeared ten paces to my right rather than returning to her body. I shifted to meet another opponent.

Sol slammed straight through Anastasia’s hunting hounds while he closed the gap between them, nearly skewering her out of the air as they engaged in a battle of arms. Her javelin burnt and corroded everything it touched, but Sol’s spear had the better reach. Their clash was a blur of whirling polearms and ferocious pressure. Every exchange flung the Caustic Queen further back, regardless of how neatly she responded. Overburdened as he had been since Thracia, and now magnified by his burning heart, Sol simply packed too great a punch for her to trade even blows with him.

Selene was pursuing Lefteris while the Gold-String Guardian tried to make space for his bow, so I rounded on the Heroic Huntsman and his prized predator.

The enormous crocodile, Sah-Bakari, could swim through the sky like it was still water under normal conditions. While Sol’s virtue was in the air, it was more like swimming upstream. A greater challenge, to be sure, but one the beast was more than capable of meeting. It contorted sinuously, pressing through Sol’s gravitas, and when its colossal maw yawned open I saw its teeth were solid gold.

I fed another year to the flames and struck the beast back down the skyfall river with a hundred hands of my pankration intent. Each clenched fist attacked with the force of the full year I’d given up. I understood intuitively that if I had thrown each of those punches over and over again for all of spring, summer, fall, and winter, the force of the attack would have been exactly the same.

Kyno didn’t even bother testing his skinning knife against the King’s Curse when I leapt up underneath him. He twisted away with shocking alacrity for his size, feeding that momentum into a roundhouse kick. I tucked my left arm and caught it on the crook of my elbow, the clap of flesh against flesh more than just loud - the shock was so intense it ruffled my hair.

Four crackling fists hammered into his thigh, drawing a tight sound of agony from his throat, and sixteen more stabbed and slapped and gouged at whatever they could reach. The lightning wasn’t enough to paralyze him, but it served as a distraction long enough to bring the King’s Curse back around.

Kyno leaned back in midair, artful even in his panic, and the King’s Curse cut the shallowest line across his jaw. Another electric flash of insight jolted me from the moment.

[-the hunt defines the huntsman-]

A crocodile’s tail formed entirely from the Huntsman’s intent - no, from Sah-Bakari’s pneuma - whipped into existence behind the Hero and slapped my sword arm aside. Kyno pushed off with the motion, flinging himself back and rolling across the earth.

I moved to follow him, enraptured by that brief glimpse at perfect clarity, but Elissa’s muse plucked another string and her spirit appeared thirty paces to my left, stabbing at Selene’s unguarded side. Invisible hands of my violent intent punched through the sound of her, rosy hands of scarlet dawn chopped down on her sword-bearing wrist, lightning hands strangled, and blood-stained fingers gouged. She passed through all of them without slowing down.

Another year went up in flames. Prometheus’ burning ichor singed the edges of my senses with its alarm. I had precious little of my heart’s blood left to lose. I couldn’t afford to spend it so frivolously.

I surged across the gap and struck her blade aside with mine. Her frustration and her fear were clearly visible to my heart sense, and that was before the King’s Curse laid her bare.

[-seven strings to dance along-]

The Sword Song’s muse plucked another string, a different string, and the sound of her spirit vanished again. It reappeared to my right, twenty paces from where she had been. Finally I understood what the Conqueror’s blade had been telling me.

Pankration hands drew the broad celestial axe I had stolen from the Temple of the Father out of my shadow and heaved it through the air. It spun end-over-end, deflecting an arrow Lefteris had shot at Selene’s heart and carrying on to sink into the archer’s shoulder. While Selene moved to capitalize on the opening, I spun back around and dropped an executioner’s heel down onto Kyno’s head. I swung my sword, the King’s Curse cut through his crocodile tail-

[-every predator shaped by their prey-]

-and I understood the nature of that skill too. Sah-Bakari was surging back into the fight, bowled over but unburdened by the attack I had spent a year of my future empowering. I swiped my blade negligently down, not truly attacking but instead guiding Kyno into my pankration hands when he flinched away from the burning blade.

Rosy-fingered dawn seized him by his tattered blue silks and his coarse black hair, flinging him up into the crocodile’s open mouth. To my surprise, Sah-Bakari didn’t even try to shift its course. Its golden maw snapped shut, swallowing Kyno whole, and the virtuous beast began to roll.

In an instant, a creature larger than a bull elephant vanished out of the open air. Unlike Elissa’s technique, however, it did not immediately resurface. Even the King’s Curse lost sight of it. For all intents and purposes, the two were simply gone.

Elissa’s muse plucked another string, and I cut a burning line through the air on my right. She appeared to my left instead. I burned yet more of my heart’s blood and struck myself with my own intent, slapping a hand over each of my ears, and shoved myself back with four open palms to avoid the thrust of her bronze sword.

Her muse wasn’t playing a guqin. That much had been obvious, but now I knew that it mattered. I restrung my mental image of the muse’s instrument, sorting the sounds in an instant, and when she plucked the next string I saw it bright as day.

The guqin was a Silk Road curiosity, seven-stringed like a Greek lyre, but Elissa’s muse wasn’t playing either of those things. She was playing a zither, an instrument that could have as many as forty strings, and as few as twenty. Trying to determine which of those strings was being plucked, and where they’d been strung relative to the others by the sound they made alone? That was something only a dedicated student of the arts could have possibly accomplished.

Elissa appeared amidst the vibration of the twenty-third string, and I nailed her right foot to the earth with my blade. She screamed, the King’s Curse fed, and I saw the greater picture.

It was there in her name - the Sword Song. While she danced outside herself, she could go wherever sound could travel, bypassing all but the most daunting obstacles. The only catch was that she needed the strings to guide her. It had been a guqin when her master taught her, and now it was a zither, but the mechanism was the same. Once I knew the distance between each string, and could match at least one of them to a location by tracking her movements, I could map out the rest of them in my mind. I could listen.

The zither twanged.

I could hear it.

Our blades clashed the moment Elissa reappeared fifty paces to my right, and this time she didn’t have the luxury of preserving her sword with a parry. I lopped off another corner of her bronze blade, and her panic was a keening sound.

Her muse loomed behind her shoulder, pulling back on another string.

The King’s Curse cut through the zither, snapping its strings with an ugly sound that tried to pull Elissa in twenty different directions at once and succeeded in moving her none. The Conqueror’s blade kept cutting, snapping hungrily for that faint finger.

The apparition of a muse flinched back and vanished from Elissa’s side. Her panic turned to horror.

“Look how they run!” I forced her back with wild sword swipes while the invisible hands of my intent swarmed over her abandoned body - still flying back through the current of Sol’s gravitas - and swung it like a hammer into her blindspot. Body and soul crashed back together, and my empty hand of flesh and blood slammed into her stomach. She flew back, gagging for air, and I pursued her.

“Look how they hide!” I shouted mockingly. “Ask them who they’re running from! Ask them where they’ve gone now that you need them!”

There came the twang of a rebounding bow string, followed by the whistling shriek of an approaching arrow. I spun in mid air and split the arrowhead down its center, the King’s Curse reaching through it as it cut.

-it was an arrow that slew Great-Heart Achilles-

The bisected halves of Lefteris’ arrow spun off behind me. The Gold-String Guardian shouted in pain, reeling back with Selene’s spear lodged in his thigh. She tried to wrench it out, but he grabbed her by the hair and kneed her in the face with his other leg. I moved to help her, my violent intent reaching out.

Elissa’s spirit rose out of her body once again. This time the string her muse plucked didn’t match any sound a zither could produce. It was close, and because of that I wrongly turned right to preempt an attack that wasn’t there. By the time I had identified its true source - a lyre - the Sword Song had already appeared behind the daughter of the Oracle and run her right hand through with the disjointed noise of her broken blade. Selene cried out, letting go her spear.

The King’s Curse cut through the noise, but Elissa was already gone, pulled away by the string of another instrument - a harp, I realized an instant too late.

The King’s Curse could tell me what their techniques did, could even give me a glimpse into the underlying acts and teachings that had made them this way, but it couldn’t tell me how they’d use them before it happened. It could only observe it after the fact. It wasn’t nearly good enough. I still couldn’t see it.

Lefteris hammered his mangled fist into Selene’s side, breaking three ribs, and in response I kicked him in the chest. His breastplate cratered, his back hit the earth, and the King‘s Curse came down. He raised his empty bow up like a shield, desperately blocking. The edge of the Conqueror’ blade met the golden string of his bow-

-it was a golden string that led Theseus to the stars-

Outrageously, the King’s Curse slid away from the delicate string of gold instead of cutting neatly through it, guided away from the Heroic archer by an unseen hand. Elissa’s muse plucked another cord. The cold, prickling sensation of being hunted re-emerged from nothing along with Kyno and Sah-Bakari as their rolling plunge pierced through the air behind me. Lefteris bared his teeth hatefully at me and spun his bow around while the static silhouette of his Muse nocked an arrow to it and drew.

I still lacked context.

Gravitas drove Kyno and his crocodile down into the dirt, and a spear that was more fist of god than flung projectile slammed through Lefteris’ bicep and dragged him off across the dirt, carrying him far from Selene and I both. The Sword Song’s muse sounded a retreat before I could even turn to meet her spirit.

Sol landed heavily beside me, covered in small lacerations that wept vile black poison. He lifted Selene up into his arms, glancing at me as he did. With a single burning look he saw the root of my frustration.

“I’m fine,” Selene protested, the words slurred by her broken nose. “I can fight, I swear I can-!” An invisible hand of my intent straightened her nose with a brutal crack. She yelped.

“Take the ichor in hand,” Sol told me. He sat the daughter of the Oracle back on her feet and beckoned with his empty hand, halting the momentum of his spear and ripping it out of Lefteris’ arm to return it to his hand. The tumbling archer dug bloody fingers into the earth to stop his own momentum. “Whatever it is you’ve found lacking - whether it’s motion, magnitude, or time - you have what’s needed to refine it. Just keep the blood in line.”

A wave of caustic heat surged up from every shadow, and my brother continued on with Selene close by his side.

We pressed the Heroes back, weathering their miracle techniques and burning all we had to give just to maintain the pace. The difference between an iron age Hero and Philosophers of our kind wasn’t as stark as it should have been, but there was a difference. Despite their animal panic they were stronger than any mortal soul could hope to be. Though their hearts were shaken and their hope was fading fast, they still burned bright enough to blind. Even with the King’s Curse in my hand, they’d kill me the moment I made a mistake. Their muses would make certain of it.

So why, when they were finally giving all that they had to give, why did it still feel not enough?

Once Sol had pointed it out to me, I felt the slithering suggestion of the Titan’s burning ichor in my veins. I crushed it in my hand, heedless of the flame, and as I clashed against my seniors in ascension over and over again, a distant part of me looked upon the ichor’s works. It had refined me in body, heart, and mind. It had stoked my every passion.

As it had stoked my every grief.

All that it had done, it had done before my advancement to the third rank set it ablaze. Now what could it do? It had been liquid refinement before, golden-bright and eager to please. Now it was a refining flame. Now it hurt to hold.

Did you think it would be painless?

I didn’t let it go, not even for a moment. It cried out to me, urging me to make use of it. All of it.

When the ichor that the King’s Curse had consumed went up in flames and turned itself upon the blade, the hungry weapon nearly vibrated out of my hand. Yet the Conqueror had said his piece, and its ownership was clear. The wanton blade raged, but it didn’t turn against me while I shaped it to my will.

I leapt over a molten river of magma, my pneuma spreading like open wings behind me. The refining flame melted down the blade’s hungry gaze, rendering it down to its base components and materials, and my borrowed awareness of the city melted away in turn. I reforged that wanton glare to better suit me, rebalancing it as Prometheus had rebalanced my humors, and when my feet touched the ground on the other side of the river my blade’s awareness expanded back out.

It didn’t reach across the city of Olympia and beyond it this time. When the sphere of my borrowed awareness ceased expanding, it was hardly a fraction of the range it had been before. That was more than fine. Keeping an eye on the Tyrants and false Heroes spread throughout the city was convenient, but it wasn’t what I needed. My target was far closer at hand. I needed a more discerning eye.

What was even left in this world that the King’s Curse had yet to show me? The answer was self-evident.

Like the cleansing of a cancer, the King’s Curse swept aside the veils of wonder and mystique that obscured the muses. My eyes that had until now slid off of them without finding purchase now shifted and settled surely onto the specter of a woman looming over Elissa’s limp body. Our eyes met.

Terpsichore stared back at me in perfect shock, her divine lips parting. She wore a dress of flowing gold that hung from only one shoulder, exposing her left breast and her two highest ribs. Her hair was kept shorter than her sisters’, a loose nest of braids that looked like they’d spill over at the slightest motion but never quite did. She wore a crown of falling leaves. Her right hand was frozen in the motion of plucking at her next string. It was a kithara this time.

“There you are,” I breathed. The muse’s finger slipped, and Elissa choked on a scream as she reappeared in the path of my blade. Blood sprayed from her abandoned body’s right thigh, the skin parting to match the wound I had inflicted on her soul.

The Dancing Muse abandoned the Heroine’s body, retreating far from me, but the King’s Curse could still see the imprints of her fingers on Elissa’s heart. Only the imprints, however. I couldn’t see the hand attached. I still lacked context.

Melt down. Reforge. Rebalance. Refine.

I added my own heart’s blood to the ichor’s efforts, sacrificing half of all that remained. When the King’s Curse cast out its senses again, they went no further than what my own eyes could see.

Blood-stained hands of my intent whirled the blade around and thrust it straight down. The Heroic Huntsman and the Gold-String Guardian cried out in dismay. Elissa arched up, returning to her body a bare moment too late. My burning blade plunged straight through her chest.

Time stood still.

The Dancing Muse shrieked in pain and horrible fury, and the hand I had cut through, the one holding the Sword Song’s heart, drew back and vanished. Elissa’s heart beat freely for the first time since her ascension to the Heroic Realm. I ripped the King’s Curse from her chest before the beating organ could brush against it.

“Why?” Elissa gagged, dragging herself back. She clutched her broken sword to her bleeding breast. “Why?!”

“You don’t need her,” I said, burning and burning. “Even if you did, she wouldn’t risk her life for yours.”

“Who are you to decide!?” she screamed. Who was I, really?

“I am Justice,” I decided. “The risen flame.”

It was that mosaic, the Sword Song sprawled out at my feet while her companions and my own converged upon us both. That was the moment that the Tyrant chose to die.

The distant silhouette of Kaukoso Mons flashed indigo-bright as every one of its amethyst veins reacted to a force unlike any other it had seen today. With the King’s Curse narrowed down to such a concentrated edge, that flash of light was the only warning I had before the Tyrant’s last gasp swept over the city.

It was worse than a hurricane, more violent than a storm. It blasted everything apart, all the world and every cloud above. Magma from the uprooted river flew through the air along with every broken building, illuminating the far off face of the Olympic Stadium. Before my eyes, the statues of previous champions acting as its walls, the sentinels that had so easily contained the bloodbath in the pit, began to crack.

The last of the Tyrant’s vitality washed over us, swept us away in its current, and the moment it touched my blade I knew which of them had died.

Ptolemy the Great blew the Half-Step City down with his final breath, and there wasn’t a stone left in the earth sturdy enough for my pankration hands to anchor me through it.

“Gravitas,” Sol snarled, and through the King’s Curse I saw him invoke both halves of his foundation.

The earth collapsed beneath our feet, unable to withstand the outrageous pressure, and I understood immediately what had happened. All his life he’d been invoking both halves of his foundations, treating them as a unified whole because that’s what they should have been. After Thracia his Roman heart had turned against him, punishing him with an overwhelming weight every time he called upon his virtue. Today, he had found a way to subvert that, calling upon only half of the greater whole - a fact that made the King’s Curse eager like a starving dog - and leveraged his Greek heart against our opponents. With his heart’s blood burning, he had even been able to empower it to something greater than ever before.

When he had burned his heart’s blood, he hadn’t been able to distinguish between Roman or Greek. And now, when he called upon both halves of his foundation, he suffered retribution as he had before. Perhaps he’d expected it to be a lighter load, empowered as he was.

Unfortunately, in his burning he had empowered his heart demons just the same.

The earth sank with Sol at the center of the crater while the heavens screamed above our heads. The Captain’s virtue dragged us all down along with him, though not with nearly as much force. It was just barely enough to anchor us. One hundred and fifty hands of my intent latched onto Sol, the remaining ten gripping Selene tight. The rest of the Heroes arrayed against us scrabbled for hand holds and stability, held down by the Greek captain’s order but called up by the winds of the Macedonian Tyrant’s last gasp.

They spoke silently, their voices buried by the wind. I read their lips instead. Pushed to the brink and flung clear over the edge of it, they called out for the help of higher powers. They called out for their muses. They called out for their Tyrants. They even called out for the mentors they had left or been left by so many years ago.

In the chaos, I saw their muses answer the call. I saw them whisper words of urgent warning. I saw them guide the Heroes I’d admired like they were puppets on strings. I saw the slender hand of the Dancing Muse darting in to reclaim the heart I’d pried her off of. And in that moment, I finally grasped what it was that had cut me to my core all this time.

I rode the push and pull of Sol-against-the-Savior, landing overtop the Sword Song. Terpsichore snatched her hand back like she’d been burned, glaring daggers up at me.

“You know nothing of our blessing,” the Dancing Muse hissed. Her wrath was clear as day, but the King’s Curse wasn’t yet focused enough to pierce through to her inner workings. It might not ever be. Not as we were. “You know nothing of our design! You’ve yet to pull the curtain back and yet you strike at what’s behind it. Wretched son of scarlet sin, you know not what you do.”

They’re all slaves, every single one of them, and so am I - this city is the chain.

What sort of king lets scavengers loose in his city? What sort of queen turns her citizens against themselves?

These cowards aren’t worth the crowns that they covet.

These heroes aren’t worth telling stories of.

These people are shadows on the wall.

This world is tarnished iron.

Every answer I had found, all my grim conclusions, they were all born of the same unspoken sentiment. They were all incomplete.

A wise man was not marked by his ability to entangle others with his words. If a thing was truly understood, it could be conveyed even to a fool.

This world is iron. What did such a sentiment convey? How could it be seen or felt? What did this ever present ache inside my soul mean to the people that had never felt it once?

You lack context.

That much was surely true. But I no longer lacked the words.

“I know this world is upside down,” I declared, casting months into the flame to make the words boom over the gale. They would all hear this, or none of them would. “I know it isn’t a child’s fault that they were born. I know that the slave is not responsible for the slaver’s whip. I know the citizens are not to blame for the tyranny of kings.”

My burning heart allowed every word to pass without complaint. It still wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t enough to condemn a naked lie. It wasn’t enough to protest a truth half told. Iron truths, golden lies, the difference was semantic, and all of it besides the point. Even now, the words I spoke lacked clarity. It wasn’t good enough.

“This woman’s failings are her own,” I told the Dancing Muse and all her seething sisters instead, pointing my burning blade down at Elissa. “Her anguish and her struggle are hers alone to bear. They mark her body and her soul with scars.

“Yet you have the audacity to stand proud for her triumphs.” I cut the air between them. Elissa choked out a curse as I split her shoulder to the bone. Terpsichore danced back, avoiding the King’s Curse entirely. “You won’t suffer with her, yet you’ll be there when she gains!”

I remembered the titan flame’s tortured conviction. I remembered the fire of his eyes.

My children are freezing. My children are blind. What else was I to do?

I remembered the golden mother’s weeping face. I remembered the sorrow in her smile.

Oh, Lio. You can’t afford to care this much.

“If you won’t suffer with us, then you’re all worse than a corpse!” I shouted. My heart thrummed in fierce approval. “If you won’t step out from behind your curtain, then what use are your designs? If you won’t join us on the stage, then begone to the stands!”

The heavenly chorus rained invectives down upon me, hurling insults like stones and rotten fruit. Behind me, Sol was forcing himself slowly but surely to his feet, eyes burning as his bloodstained lips whispered a recursive oath. I’ll rise. I’ll rise. I’ll rise. I burnt my future away and added the strength of my pankration hands to his efforts.

This world is iron now. What was the plain truth behind the poetry? My virtuous heart demanded that I bring it forth into the light. It wouldn’t wait another moment.

“They’ve lied to us,” I told them all. Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, and Anastasia. The companions I’d burnt and blamed. Sol and Selene - my brother and my sister. My heart throbbed with vibrant satisfaction.

“Our higher powers lied. They told us all to take their hand, they promised that they’d pull us up to heaven, that they’d show us the way, and it was all of it a lie.”

We exist in three parts, and each of them is king inside our soul.

All this time, I had been dancing blindly around the simple truth.

There was no path to heaven without a beating heart.

The burning ichor swept over the first of all my pillars, the conviction I had built upon my soul. My virtuous heart won’t tolerate a lie. It scoured the cracked and fractured stone away, consuming it in an instant. When it passed, the pillar still stood. Free of imperfections, now stronger than before.

“Your reasons are irrelevant,” I informed the muses. “Your intentions are the same. From myself, as from my brother, from my heroes and my foes, and especially from the chorus, my conviction is the same.”

[My virtuous heart won’t tolerate anything but the truth.]

Sol rose up with a shout of effort and flung them all out of the bowl. We pursued them, driving them out of the city and towards the distant sea.

We burned and kept burning. If I stopped now and cast aside all cultivation for a life of peaceful duty, I wouldn’t live long enough to be my father’s current age. Then again, I wouldn’t live another instant if I betrayed my beating heart here. I might survive, but only in a Tyrant’s wretched way. I wouldn’t allow it. I’d die before I did.

We clashed. We bled. We saw ourselves in truth.

When the winds abruptly buckled overhead, I was sure another Tyrant had died. Then I heard the whistle. It was too familiar to forget - I’d heard it up close too many times.

When the one note shifted, rising to a pitch I’d never heard before, I spun out of my half-done strike and turned my eyes to heaven. Through the lens of scarlet and golden flame, I only saw the breaking of the storm.

Through the concentrated edge of the King’s Curse, I saw the warping of creation.

The Hero Scythas erupted from the storm above our heads with a pewter crown upon his head, spinning a scythe of glossy obsidian around him like a thresher. And impossibly, miraculously, he cut straight through the storm. Gathered it and coated his scythe with its purpose.

The defiant miracle imprinted itself upon the world, assembled from the shards of fallen stars to form a cosmic mosaic - a living constellation. The light spelled out his deed. Through the King’s Curse, I could see it.

The second act of his Epic.

******************************************

** SCYTHAS REAPS THE WHIRLWIND **

******************************************

Lightning fell from starry heaven and struck the hero twice. The first bolt Scythas weathered, his hazel burning heart flaring to its limits. The second bolt was caught by an upraised hand of master-crafted stone. Untouched, the Hero of the Scything Squall advanced to the second rank.

I laughed in pure and honest joy while he brought the storm down on our heads.

1.137 [Scythas]

Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall

There’s still time, but less and less.

You have the stronger heart.

He isn’t what you thought he was. You can bring him down.

You can defeat him.

You must defeat him.

This is your only chance.

My dear hero, you have to move.

You have to fight!

You have to do it now-!

The spear plunged straight through his heart, yet it hardly hurt at all. The Scarlet Oracle’s eyes burned scarlet, glaring into his, and the world spun around him. Scythas was flung, fell, and skipped across marble like a stone over still water. The tumble hurt worse than the stab.

Scythas propped himself up on a scraped and bleeding elbow, prodding at the wound in his chest. Or rather, prodding the place where the wound should have been. Prodding with fingers that should have been longer. Panic stabbed straight through his heart, and there at last he felt the pain. The panic.

“No,” he breathed. His voice was pitched higher than it should’ve been. Higher than it had been in years.

A storm had been raging in the city of Olympia when the Oracle stabbed him with her hallowed spear. Only a moment ago, they had all been in the center of it. Now that storm was gone, another had taken its place. As he watched, it consumed all that remained of the Half-Step City. Everything gave away to the wind until all that remained was the center of the eye.

The Oracle stepped past him. Scythas lunged for her trailing skirt in terror.

“Please!” he cried out in a child’s helpless panic. “Not this! Anything, but this!”

His body didn’t move as it should have, too small to accommodate his mind’s demands. She slipped through his fingers and carried on towards the edge of the eye. The world beyond it was opaque, nothing more than a screaming wall of hurricane winds.

“Selene! Don’t leave me here!” he wailed, hating how familiar it felt to sob the words into the wind.

“I warned you, cultivator.” The words were melancholy, but the sun-kissed Heroine didn’t look back once. “I never cured your heart, only cut away the symptoms - you should have cleaned the wound. But you didn’t. You made no offerings and swore no oaths.”

The Oracle cast out her empty hand like she was tossing something away.

“I see now that it wasn’t mine to take.”

He didn’t want it back. He had no room for it in his heart - a new hurt had already sprung up to take its place. The rot she’d taken from him in Thracia would make the burden double.

“That isn’t fair.” He stumbled and crawled across the broken tiles. She was already gone. He screamed brokenly into the wind, “That isn’t fair!”

Even here, the wind carried her parting words to his ear.

“Once given and twice returned.”

As the Oracle vanished through the storm, a hand latched onto his thigh.

Scythas screamed and lurched away from it. His grass-green silks, still vibrant and new, tore away in the wind’s invisible grip. Another hand seized onto his ankle and tripped him up when he tried to run. Another settled on his shoulder and pressed him down. Two gripped his hips, ripping more and more of his silks away.

He thrashed and he struggled, calling upon his pneuma and the wind, but that only made the storm beyond the eye howl louder. He slipped out of his silks piece by piece, but the formless hands of wind only seized upon his skin, scratching bloody furrows through his flesh when he fought them.

“Urania!” Scythas called out to a Muse that had yet to claim him when he was still this young. He begged the heavenly diviner, “Help me! Please! Show me the way! Urania!”

“I’m here,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against his. The relief was so powerful it nearly knocked him back down to the floor. A moment later, the hands did that themselves.

The Heavenly Muse pointed a slender finger, a path of shining stars spiraling out from its tip. Scythas traced them with his eyes, following them to their destination-

“I can’t.”

“You must.”

Urania’s path out was no path out at all. Rather than escape, it urged him to pursue. It pointed him towards the center of his festering heart.

“I’m not strong enough.”

“You are.”

Tears spilled down his cheeks.

“I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”

“You have all that you need.” she promised, whispering it like a secret in his ear. “The path is there before you. This much is all I can do.”

A hand of wanton wind fisted itself in his hair, twisting his face away from hers.

“Please.”

He felt her leave his heart just as Selene had done. And just the same, the wind carried her parting words to his ear while its greedy hands roamed.

They were the first words she had ever spoken to him, in the silence proceeding tragedy, delivered on the deck of a ship with no oars while black clouds and curtains of rain and rising waves darkened his horizon. Back then, same as now, she had only been able to offer him the path through it.

[“Your story is one of weathering storms.”]

Hands of howling wind weighed him down, spread him apart, and dug deep for his heart. Finally, as he always had, Scythas gave up on resistance. He was alone and he was weak. Struggling would only make it worse. All he could do was all that he had ever done - endure it. Weather it. Close his eyes and pray that it would pass-

“Such vile cynicism. I won’t forgive her for it.”

Subsumed by groping hands, Scythas nonetheless recognized the one that grasped his chin and lifted it up. It was firm and steady where the hands of wind were formless violence. It was cold, where Urania’s ethereal hand had been warm. Like stone.

A pewter rim pressed against his lips and liquid heat poured down his throat. It was the most delicious thing that Scythas had ever tasted. It was every good thing that had ever touched his tongue, joined together and made more - it was drinks and meals he had no conscious memory of, too young to have remembered. It was the heady mead his father had snuck him from his cup. It was his mother’s own sweet mix of herbal wine and honey.

Scythas’ eyes, which had been sightlessly staring head, shivered and refocused. He looked upon the hand that held the cup. Its owner knelt behind him, knelt over him, and as he drank from the cup her right hand offered, he felt her left pry the storm’s wanton fingers from his flesh. One by one, she tore them off and she tore them out, breaking them when they struggled.

“You said you couldn’t help,” he finally choked out when the last of the liquid was gone.

The statue of Urania withdrew the cup and traded it for a crown. The pewter ring of stars settled heavily on his head, cold even through the thick curls of his hair.

“That woman wasn’t worthy of my name.” She sounded more furious than he thought a Muse could be. “She may have worn my face, but I’ll never accept her as Urania. The years between us aren’t enough to justify her behavior. There aren’t enough stars in the sky.”

The stone statue of the maiden drew the carved robes off her shoulders. They flowed like liquid as she wrapped them firm around his battered body, leaving herself naked in the process. Horrified, Scythas tried to press them back.

“That’s too much. You can’t - your body shouldn’t be-”

“It isn’t yet enough.” The statue that he’d stolen from the storm by means of a pewter crown brushed Scythas’ hands away and cinched the stone silks tight around his waist. “Cynic that she is, that woman did more than wrong you with her presence. She even had the gall to reach beyond her station.”

“How?” Scythas whispered, unable to imagine something that existed above the nine. “The Father?” Had she insulted Him, somehow?

“Worse than that. She’s forgotten why it is we call ourselves cultivators. Rather than nurture your journey, she had the audacity to tell you what sort of ending it would have. She tried to stunt your glory.”

The storm raged, and the festering wound inside his heart reared up as the last of its hands were forced off of him. Scythas stared into the eye of the storm. It glared hungrily back.

Some battles couldn’t be won. He’d learned that lesson early on. Some things could only be survived.

[“Your story is one of weathering storms.”]

[“Are you sure?”]

“There’s a storm here in your heart,” Urania agreed, cold stone lips brushing past his ear. Scythas shivered. “But who said you had to suffer it? You didn’t just weather the winds that delivered you from the west - you filled that ship’s sails yourself.”

Scythas stared up at the hungry eye. He rose slowly up to one knee. His hands clenched into fists.

His pneuma was against him. His heart wasn’t his own. He needed a weapon, something more than a child’s fists, but it was all lost to the storm-

The moment that he thought it, she buried a pewter scythe in the stone before him. In the reflection of its wicked blade, Scythas saw his brother’s face.

“I’m with you.”

For once, he knew she meant it.

1.136 [The Tyrant Riot]

The time has come and so have I.

Book 2 of Virtuous Sons, The Tyrant Riot, is now available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

Same drill as before - paperback and hardcover editions (with unique hardcover art) will be available as soon as Amazon clears them for print, hopefully within the week. Book 2 will be receiving an audio book adaptation in the same style as the first, but it'll take a bit longer this time around. I'll keep you all posted as that one develops.

As always, a review is worth its weight in gold. A few words to let the Kindle masses know what you think goes a long way, and I appreciate all of you that have already pre-ordered and drummed up some thoughts in advance. You're more than I deserve.

Here's to two, and soon to three. Thank you all for sticking with my story. I hope you keep enjoying it.

But enough about that. It's time to riot.

------

The Tyrant Riot

Their feud was ancient.

With their finest days so many years behind them, it was easy for an outsider to forget that the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had once been the hands that shaped the free world. The fact that they could be called elders at all, each one marked by the same indigo brush, was itself a damning sign of their decline. They had been unique existences once. They had been triumphant, and terrible.

Even before the high bastard of the Raging Heaven Cult had stolen them from their thrones, they had despised one another. It was often said that a monarch inherited their nation’s riches alongside its scars, and that every son bore the burden of his father’s sins. For existences like theirs, inheriting nations from fathers and mothers that had ruled for countless mortal generations, the weight of ancestral enmity was overwhelming.

Tearing each of them down from the seat of their power, breaking their crowns and discarding their fragments - that has been insult enough. The kyrios could have killed them then and there and they would have spent an eternity cursing his existence in the underworld. But, of course, that hadn’t been enough for the Free Mediterranean's least satiable hedonist. No. He’d wanted more from them.

The elder Tyrants of the cult hated the mad kyrios for usurping them. But they reviled him for forcing them to band together.

Time together had done nothing to mend the wounds inflicted by their predecessors. There were not enough centuries, could never be enough thread on the loom, for their enmity to be put to rest. Shared company only made it worse. Naturally, though he waxed poetic whenever challenged on the subject, the kyrios had known this would be the result.

He’d thought it was funny at the time

Now, their joining brought ruin to his city. They destroyed it all - the monuments built in his name, the monuments that he had built himself, and all the bright-eyed examples of the young generation’s budding virtue. All of it crumbled in the face of eight Tyrants’ ancient malediction.

Cosmic laws were overwritten, repealed, and overwritten again at a rate that mortal man could hardly even conceptualize, let alone perceive. Their clashing destroyed the world around them in a thousand different ways, sparing nothing but the enduring amethyst that wound through and bolstered Kaukoso Mons. Free at last to vent their anger, they unmade everything the Tyrant Riot had built.

They found no catharsis in the act. In fact, it only stoked their fury. No matter how much of his life’s work they unmade, they couldn’t destroy the portion of him that still lingered in the marrow of their bones.

No matter what they took from the kyrios’ accursed legacy, they couldn’t shake the feeling he was laughing at them still.

They fought alone against seven, each of the kyrios’ would-be usurpers, but the word brawl could not have done it justice. Even the concept of a battle was not enough. Regardless of their current circumstances and no matter how disgraced - when a Tyrant fought, they went to war.

The war for the indigo throne had begun the day the Tyrant Riot died. They had waged it cold, searching through shadows and cats’ paws for the moment where the stars aligned to strike. Each of them had desired a different version of this day, but the fact that it would come had never once been a doubt in their minds. The kyrios had throttled eight lions, chained them each to one other, and left them all to starve while vultures circled overhead. How else could it have ended?

In circumstances like these, they had no choice but to eat each other. Four of them had been deceived into a vagabond’s alliance, but their careful vows hardly mattered here - the Tyrants of Howling Wind, Scattered Foam, Broken Tide, and Waning Wax had sworn to stand against the First Son to Burn, that much was firm. But they hadn’t sworn to stand together. Nor had they sworn to spare the rest of their rivals in the joining. The raven had changed things, but only just.

Without his ethos, the Tyrant Polyzalus was not an insurmountable threat. By all accounts, the fracturing of his foundations should have rendered him a complete non-entity when the war began in earnest. Yet somehow, his wrath was more than enough to match their dominions. That wrath, and the Gadfly’s incessant fucking buzzing. They dealt horrific blows to one another, violence on a scale that made Polyzalus’ earlier clash with his Butcher look like a child’s squabble, but soon found themselves trapped in a terrible equilibrium.

If the raven’s alliance had been made of horn rather than ivory, the war might have been won in an instant. If any of them had been capable of tolerating even one more rival to the indigo throne, even just until the day was done, they might have been able to turn that tide as two. But it had been centuries since any of them were capable of such compromise - these days, they would only act together if they had no other choice. So instead they waged eight wars alone, and not a single one was winnable.

Until suddenly, one of them was.

When a pillar of stark light rose up from the earth to drill through starry heaven, their disbelief warped the air around the mountain. Some of the elders were far older than others, but none of them were young enough to have been spared the scars of this particular purpose. They couldn’t have forgotten it if they’d tried.

This far from its origin point, the touch of its hunger was a faint and distant thing. Uncaring of their efforts to keep it that way, the King’s Curse gnawed away at them. Sliver by sliver, undeterred, it devoured their dominions. The Conqueror’s blade cast its hungry shadow over the entire city, enshrouding all their souls but one. Not even the bastard spawn of Rosy Dawn that had drawn it was spared.

The only man the King’s Curse spared was Ptolemy, and only then because it had claimed his soul long ago. Had that been the extent of it, though their immediate priorities would have surely shifted, the war would not have changed. But it wasn’t, and so it did.

Like the rebirth of a star, the Hollow Satrap drew strength from the coronating light that had shrouded them in shadows. He lit up from within, the yawning hollow of his eerie domain giving way to stark light and overwhelming purpose. His body swiftly followed suit.

The Tyrant once known as the Savior had been emaciated for centuries, starving worse than any of his peers. It was unheard of for a Tyrant’s body to disobey their idea of themselves, yet Ptolemy looked closer to a corpse than he ever could a king. It could be seen in his hair, white with age and thinning out. It could be seen in his sunken cheeks, ever without color. It could be inferred from his dim eyes, their spark long dead. He still possessed a Tyrant's stature, but it was difficult to tell when he could no longer stand up at his fullest height. He’d been hunched and hollowed out by his crimes. It had been that way since before the kyrios came to collect him, and his condition had only grown worse with time. It was the only reason why the Tyrants of the true Greek city-states tolerated his existence.

Of all the Tyrants left in Olympia after the kyrios’ passing, the First Son to Burn had emerged as the clearest present threat. However, that was as they were. Had each of them stood at their fullest prime, it would have been a different one that threatened seven. And it wouldn’t have been close.

Ptolemy’s skeletal frame abruptly expanded and filled out, like some unseen colossus had been inhaling his every essence for centuries and was just now finally exhaling. Iron cords of muscle surged beneath his skin, bringing color and healthy definition to his frame. He straightened his back and rose to his full height, his spine cracking and popping grotesquely with the motion, and when he was done he stood taller than even the towering Queen of the Amazons. His cheeks filled out, accentuating a strong jaw that before had made him look like half a corpse. His thinning hair fell out entirely, was forced out, as dark curls of hair burst forth from his skin. A full head of dark and wavy hair sprung up from his head as if it had always been there, stripping away his oldest years in an instant.

Ptolemy inhaled his first full breath in centuries, the decrepit robes that had hung limp off his body for so long now straining to the limits of their threads as his barrel chest expanded. Though each of his rivals had stopped dead in their tracks at the appearance of the coronating pillar, they were forced to turn away from it as a second beacon of stark suffering lit up the plateau of the indigo cult.

The source of the horrible resonance, the linking hand in the shape of a man, took all the wind from his first full breath in centuries and used it to roar.

“DEFILER!”

The Macedonian’s pneuma exploded from him in a torrent, no longer consuming mindlessly as his hollow domain had for so many years. The rest of the seven matched themselves against it, at first only with a portion of their efforts - Aleuas tried to divert it with his hurricane’s current, Solon attempted to remake it, and Midas tried to turn it all to gold. They attempted to block, to steal, to make their own, or even to ignore. Very quickly, they realized not one of those methods would be enough.

Ptolemy thrashed them all, more than twice the man he’d been a moment ago, and less than half the man he’d be a moment later. The light of shining stars poured out from his soul, glowing brighter by the second and gathering around his head in a coalescing crown. He overwhelmed their sickly domains. He broke the weapons in their hands. Hit them with clenched fists that struck like falling stars. All the while, he raged at the presumption of the newest scarlet son, whose hands had dared to grasp above his station.

Every second he grew stronger, and every moment more enraged. In the latter sense, he was far from alone. The instant that that coronating pillar had drilled up through the heavens, every Tyrant on the mountain knew the golden raven had to die.

Unfortunately, that shared resolve would do them little good if Ptolemy tore them all to shreds before he went and killed the boy.

They fought to flee, but he would not let them regroup. They fought to distract, but he would not be swayed from his new purpose. They fought to survive, but the Conqueror’s mad dog had gone centuries without a meal and it was time for him to eat. He took them all in hand, and the world around them warped as the distant roar of marching feet and the screaming of war horses loomed loudly in his soul. A long-repressed nightmare brought terror to their empty chests. Their intent faltered and slipped from their fingers, leaving just the empty dread.

By the time the Macedonian froze up again, the plateau was all but won. His right hand had Leonidas by the neck, strangling the Spartan king and all 300 of his infernal Heroes. His left hand had palmed Thalestris’ skull like a discus and wrenched her head back so that she formed an arch worthy of a bowstring, a finger buried into each of her eye sockets. His heel ground Midas deeper into the mountain than any of their attacks had cut thus far, breaking the Tyrant’s golden spine like so much brittle clay. The remaining four of seven were hardly any better off.

In no time at all, the balance of the indigo war had shifted entirely out of their hands. The Savior’s abrupt hesitation was the last chance they’d ever get, each of them knew. Yet not a single one of seven Tyrants moved to take advantage of it.

When the voice of an era returned from the East, heaven and earth and all those in between stood still to hear him speak.

“NO.”

Their horror would have stopped their hearts if they still had one between them.

“NEVER NOTHING. NEVER NO ONE.”

It echoed through the city and far, far beyond it. Further than even their perceptions stretched. It carried over the mountain ranges. It carried across the seas.

Leonidas fell wheezing to the ground. Thalestris crumpled in a bloody, blinded heap.

Ptolemy the Great looked towards the stark pillar of the north with shock and silent hope.

“THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.”

The Conqueror named his heir with pride, daring all that heard it to deny him, and the chorus of heaven raged impotently in response.

“Alex,” Ptolemy breathed. His outrage vanished, gone like it had never been. They heard a skipping beat inside his chest. They heard - his heart. He had a heart. “My brother!”

Ptolemy the Great discarded all his rivals like forgotten trash, the star crown on his brow blazing with salvation’s light. He left the seven of them there on the brink of bitter oblivion, like the bounty of their souls wasn’t worth the harvest. Like they meant nothing to him at all.

“My king!”

He shouted out, and rushed away with soaring hope.

“I’m with you! I’m here! I swear to you upon the Styx, I’ll never stray again!”

Their feud was ancient, their egos unsurpassed. Even when opportunity had come and hammered down their doors, offering up the crippled king of Burning Dusk, their hatred of each other hadn’t allowed for a single moment of true cooperation. It was simply what they were. Even the death of Polyzalus wasn’t worth the insult to their ethos. Since the day the Tyrant Riot died, they’d each resolved to never share their strength again.

The moment Ptolemy the Great turned his back on his rivals to join the king of kings, they ran him through with seven swords of all their strongest powers. They struck him down together.

The Savior died with kingdoms in his eyes.

His final breath scattered Olympia to the wind.

The Tyrant Riot [PDF/EPUB]

It's nearly that time again - once book two is live on Kindle Unlimited, I'll be taking down all of the chapters covered on Royal Road, SpaceBattles, QuestionableQuesting, and Patreon. For those of you seeing this before the launch, help yourselves to one of the press copies attached below.

If you're reading this after April 6th 2023 and there are no press copies attached, swing by the discord (https://discord.gg/virtuoussons) and we'll get you sorted out.

Two days to go. See ya boys then.

1.135

When the Despoiled Queen of the Amazons let fly her blind arrow, starry night seeped through the skies above the City of Olympia and beyond it. For those unfortunate enough to still be in the city, it was an instantaneous shift. For those that had taken the Raging Heaven Cult’s earlier unrest for the warning that it was, fleeing the city with their most valuable possessions bundled up in carts and carried on their backs, the sunset lights were ripped away like a tablecloth to reveal the dark heavens behind it. Further beyond that, on the Ionian Sea, it spilled across the horizon like the Father had turned out his cup.

Aboard the unwieldy Alikonia, the excited buzz of conversation between Nikolas Aetos’ companions died a swift death as they noticed the dark tide bearing down on them. By the time the lesser cultivators in the company had the presence of mind to look, the setting sun at their backs had already been swallowed up.

“Niko,” the Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss whispered. Her younger siblings and her tagalong slave were too frightened to speak. “What just happened?”

The Stark Blade of the Aetos family had already gathered his youngest cousins loosely to him. Now he leaned over them protectively, one hand falling to the hilt of his sword as he stared out past the ship’s bow.

“Was that-?” One of the heroes clustered around the Sand Reckoner squinted up at the stars above, like the answer was written there in small print.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” another immediately shut them down. “You’re just not… looking… hard enough…” Their voice slowly trailed away.

“The moon is gone,” the Heroine Iphys quietly observed.

“Thalestris?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s gone.”

“Why would she ever? In the middle of the city, now of all times, with every hero there just itching for their shot?”

“Then where is it?”

They bickered on like this until it became apparent they wouldn’t reach a consensus alone.

“Niko,” said a Heroine with features like autumn leaves, silencing the back-and-forth. “What do you think?”

The Stark Blade gathered his heavy pneuma around his cousins like a cloak. Blue eyes burning bright, he spoke.

“I think-”

Light.

Every Heroic cultivator on the ship lit up in alarm, their pneuma spilling across the deck of the Alikonia and threatening the lives of all its lesser passengers. The cloak of the Stark Blade’s own pneuma acted as an inadvertent shield to the three Civic cultivators piled up in his lap. The girl that had begged to be taken along in pursuit of the Young Miss nearly died on the spot - would have died, had the Sand Reckoner not snapped his fingers and caused the planks she was sitting on to cave in, sending her plummeting down into the safety of the ship’s lower quarters.

Those left above deck stared in naked alarm at the grim horizon. Wary hands reached for any weapon they could find.

In the distance, originating from a point they still couldn’t see from this distance, a pillar of light too large to be believed rose from earth up to the heavens and burnt away a ring of clouds ten leagues across in its passing. It lit up the world, bright and all-encompassing as the sun, but harsher - its stark glow was as much lightning as it was dawn.

It cast long shadows across the Free Mediterranean, resonating with a long-forgotten purpose.

It said this was the end.

Unnoticed by his stricken passengers, the Sand Reckoner clicked his tongue and scrubbed a charcoal circle off the deck with the heel of his hand.

“He always gets his way.”

——

The Young Griffon

It was more than just a sword.

Glaring lights and coronating heat scoured the broken city around me in a circle wide enough to build a second stadium upon. In the time it took me to rip the blade from its sheath in a rising parry, it reached out and consumed everything but the earth itself within that circle. It made no sound at all. It was deafening.

The Flame’s golden ichor screamed an outraged warning in my veins, abandoning all its current refinement and converging on the covetous invader. Its efforts were in vain. From the moment my late uncle’s blade had cleared its sheath, it had turned its edge upon everything within reach.

My soul was no exception.

The blade howled, and it devoured. In the time it took to follow through with my parry, it took more from me than any mundane sword was capable of taking. I felt my boiling blood sublimate in my veins and vanish. In the time it took me to lower the blade to a ready position, it took twice that much again.

It was said that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be ten thousand years old if the Fates were kind enough to allow it. By that measure, as a second rank Philosopher I had two thousand years worth of vitality flowing through my veins.

In the time it took the blade to rise and fall, it stripped decades off my life.

“You’ll die!” the golden ichor warned me in Niko’s voice. I straightened up, standing tall and rolling my shoulders.

“Sheathe it! Don’t you understand? You’ll die! You’ll die! You’ll die!”

As if I hadn’t known that from the start.

The blade was polished bronze, double-edged and forged in the style of a one-handed xiphos but longer than a greatsword. Looking at it was like staring at the sun back when its light could still blind me. It cast off heat and stark light in relentless shockwave currents, yet somehow, paradoxically, it drew everything around it into its gleaming surface.

In manic hilarity, a distant portion of me noted that the blade perhaps most deserving of decoration had been left all but bare. Its only ornament was a pair of words inscribed into the base near its hilt, the script too small and plainly etched to be pleasing to the eye.

ϝάνακτος καταρϝος

The King's Curse.

The wanton blade drank my heart’s blood greedily, exacting its terrible price for daring to wield it as my own. It took decades from me as I stood in the inverted eye of its scouring storm. It took centuries.

By the time I turned my eyes upon my enemy, a third of my future was gone.

Reunited with her body, Elissa looked at me with wild eyes. Half-crouching and half-sprawled at the edge of the blade’s scouring pillar, the desert heat wavered behind her eyes. For the moment, she was terrified beyond action. The sound that I had parried was nothing more than an echo of her sword, yet somehow the bronze blade shaking in her hands had been severed halfway up its length. As she shook, a vertical line appeared in the center of her forehead and parted, weeping blood that split at the bridge of her nose and carried on in two trails.

The rest of them were just as stricken. The King's Curse staggered them all, scattering them with its terrible presence even as it drew them in.

There was Kyno to my right, overshadowed now by the gargantuan Sah-Bakari, the virtuous beast looming over him like a protective mother. I saw Lefteris to my left, his mangled fingers just out of reach of his discarded bow. His lips moved soundlessly as he looked upon me, unable to make sense of it. Anastasia’s hunting hounds shrank back from the pillar, whimpering in terror, while the Caustic Queen herself hid somewhere out of sight.

Sol and Selene crouched behind me, well beyond the pillar’s reach. Two rosy palms had struck the scarlet Heroine in center mass and flung her out of harm’s way. The remaining twenty-eight had just barely been strong enough to send the Roman skidding out to join her.

Not far enough. The drilling column of coronating power wasn’t a boundary for the blade - it was only a declaration of its intent. The King's Curse reached beyond it, taking from my brother and from Selene, taking from the Heroes arrayed against us, and reaching further across the ruined City of Olympia to take from ever more. Standing at its starving center, it consumed me most rabidly of all.

One was enough. Presumptuous, ugly blade, I didn’t say you could have them all.

I hammered down on it with all that I was, everything I would ever have to give, and the King's Curse ate that too. It drew me in. It made me a part of it, a portion of a greater whole.

As it drank me dry, I saw the world as it perceived it.

Olympia was dying. It had been gutted by my brother, scarred by the wayward acts of Tyrants, and burnt out at its heart by unworthy champions. The King's Curse swept over them all, enveloping them in the shadow of its ceaseless hunger as it expanded.

The Heroes - no, the animals still inside of the Olympic Stadium, were ripping themselves limb-from-limb with techniques that should have leveled the city three times over by now. The reason why that hadn’t happened - the reason why the stadium was still standing at all - was invisible to me, but plainly apparent to my wanton blade. I looked through its eyes and saw it for myself.

A wretched captain of the third realm shouted his bloodthirsty defiance as four lesser dogs converged on him from every cardinal direction.

The captain burned seventeen years along with one more spring and summer from the end of his life, distilling that down to pure potential, time, and instantly transmuting it to magnitude. His beating heart supplied the burning fuel, his mind supplied the question of what would be done with it, and the instinct in his gut gave him the answer.

The wretched captain’s soul was built on foundations of speckled limestone, worn down and made smooth by the ceaseless crashing of broken tides. Its load-bearing colonnades were stout and ugly things, all ten of them pockmarked principles of aimless violence. The statues dedicated to his fulminating acts were little better - every one of them a brutal culling. The captain’s soul was a monument to cruelty without purpose.

The barking dog chose one of ten acts that had defined him, the slaying of a terrible virtuous beast. Though an entire settlement had lent him their spears along with their fathers and sons to see it done, he had taken all the credit as his own as the battle’s sole survivor. As such, the ability manifested in two parts - one, a cloud of sea spray that drowned all those who inhaled it, and the other, a protective ring of seven hundred and thirty-two bristling spears. One for every son and father that had died to mauling or to drowning while they held the beast in place for him.

When the wretched captain of the third realm invoked that act and burnt his heart’s blood, he proposed a question: If I could live this moment for seventeen years, plus another spring and one more summer, how much greater could that act have been?

This was how cultivators in the third realm empowered themselves beyond the boundaries of their station. As a result, the wretched captain’s sea spray strike exploded from his every pore, not simply drowning those who breathed it in unprepared, but also blinding them with salt that melted their eyes in their sockets, seizing them in riptide currents that halted their momentum, and wearing away the flesh from their bones as though they’d spent the better part of twenty years ravaged by constant crashing waves.

It was a common use of passion. At the same time that the captain was doing this, the four lesser dogs arrayed against him were doing much the same. One offered up twenty-four and a half years of their lifespan to empower their motion, dancing through the worst of the spray with impossible grace. Another offered forty-seven years and a single cloudless night to empower the magnitude of their manifested shield, blocking not just the sea spray’s ability to blind and grind flesh from bone, but also blocking the imposition of the act - protecting him, impossibly, from the label of beast that the captain’s act imposed, and thus negating its ability to drown him. Another still gave up exactly one century in order to lend her sling enough force for its iron orb projectile to punch through anything short of adamant.

The last of the four, and the runt of their unsightly litter without any greater mystery to inspire his foundations, burned with an insecurity backed by personal hatred of his opponent. This one set fire to twenty thousand years, and he gave it all to his dagger before he threw it. It left him defenseless while the knife spun unerringly for the wretched captain’s heart, coated in hateful poison that was potent enough to kill a man on the thirty-fourth step towards divinity.

By all standard measures, the wretched captain should have been ripped apart by his lessers. He was outnumbered and had sacrificed the least of all of them for his technique.

However, the captain had not called upon a standard act. How could the effects of its empowerment be anything but warped as a result?

The four leaping dogs had accounted for the empowerment of his sea spray, but not his secondary attack. When the wretched captain offered up time to empower his deed, he gained more than he should have from the exchange. More than just his own impossible efforts, taken from the future and condensed down to this moment. More than that, he gained the efforts of the settlement’s sons and fathers too.

Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to devote themselves to their spears. Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to reach their full maturation, to raise their sons that had been too young to aid the captain on that day. Seventeen years, plus one spring and another summer for those seven hundred and thirty-two men to have more sons, and to raise them for this singular purpose.

This was not an act of passion. The King's Curse recognized it for what it was: an echo of the fourth realm. And because the King's Curse knew it, so did I.

The wretched captain offered up three thousand six hundred and ninety-four tortured souls, fathers and sons that had died to protect their home along with an entire generation of their unborn heirs. Of the four lesser dogs converging on the captain, only the runt that had sacrificed twenty thousands years to his knife was unsurprised by the second layer of the attack.

Three thousand six hundred and ninety-four spears exploded from the sea spray, skewering the four challengers from every possible angle. Three died instantly, their techniques and the last of their vitality leaving their corpses in a destructive rush. The runt alone clung stubbornly to life, unable to move but determined to watch as his tumbling knife sank into the captain’s chest.

The wretched captain’s breastplate, another product of toil not his own, stopped the dagger with only a sliver of its tip pressed into his skin. The captain plucked it out and sauntered over to the runt, twirling it between his fingers. He said something cruel and unimportant, then buried the knife to its hilt in the lesser dog’s neck.

A moment later he collapsed screaming to the sand, scrabbling at his breastplate where it covered his heart. The runt, suspended above the captain by the spears of his father, his brothers, and all their tortured neighbors, hocked and spat bloody spittle onto the writhing captain’s face.

The wretched dog ripped the breastplate from his chest, revealing a rugged torso marred by ugly inflammation. The runt couldn’t speak, skewered as he was by spears and his own poisoned knife, but with the voice of his soul he whispered something spiteful and unimportant down at the captain.

In response, the captain drove his own fingers into his chest, breaking past his ribs and taking hold of his heart. He howled in terror and outrage, pulling, and they both vanished beneath the light of tribulation lightning.

Similar scenes played out across the bloody sand pit, and the Olympic Stadium contained them all. The King's Curse knew why. Though the walls of the stadium, such as they were - less walls and more an ascending spiral ramp, with each layer supported by statues of past champions rather than traditional load-bearing columns - appeared to my eyes to be more form than they were function, the truth was entirely different. The spirit lime chosen for the load-bearing statues was durable in a way that defied the rules of nature, relying upon the legacy of the former champions whose shapes it had taken to retain its shape and resist external wear.

No matter what havoc the animals inside the pit unleashed, they were all of them lesser than the Champions that had brought glory to those sands before them. So long as that was true, the stadium’s walls would never fall. Nothing would trespass them. It was one of the most remarkable feats of architecture that this world had ever seen - the King's Curse knew that with authority, and so I knew it too.

While my mind was there in the pit, observing that madness, it was a thousand other places at the same time. I was made aware of countless revolting scenes playing out in the crumbling ruin of a city that had once been without equal. And as I watched through the wanton blade’s awareness, I understood something pivotal. Whatever the King's Curse could perceive, it could eat.

On the distant mountain beneath the Storm That Never Ceased, eight Tyrants were laid bare before my borrowed senses. I understood them with the same vivid clarity that I had understood the third realm animals down in the pit. The soul of a fourth realm cultivator was exponentially more complex than those of the third realm, but to the King's Curse it was like comparing a child’s aimless scribbles to a student’s sloppy imitation. It was all the same.

Foundations warped - tempered, my dwindling voice whispered - by greater mysteries. Ten pillars of load-bearing principle. Ten statues dedicated to legendary deeds. And above it all, a sloping dome roof, each Tyrant’s formed from a different material. Gold for the sullen King of Setting Suns, Pewter for the lying Queen of the Amazons, and so on and so forth. Regardless of their composition, all of them blocked out the skies above their souls. On the inside of those domed roofs, each of them had painted a mural of their dominion.

Men, women, and children huddled beneath these roofs in their hundreds and their thousands, bound by purpose and shackled to the pillars and the statues.

Distantly, I felt someone whisper in my ear.

The fraud from the Alabaster Isles, king of any number of kingdoms depending on who was asking and how he felt that day, possessed a dominion faker than his name. The Golden Touch, he called it, the ability to turn anything and everything within his purview to gold - and to revert it back at any time. In reality, it was tarnished iron imitating the real thing. Fool’s gold.

The whisper persisted. It was closer than before.

The forked-tongue bastard of serpent seers, king of tall grasses and overturned breadbaskets, possessed a dominion more deceptive than his mother. Drowned out by the howling of hurricane winds and the obnoxious cacophony of clattering wind chimes, the serpents that lay basking on the domed roof of his soul hissed their constant omens in his ear. It was nothing even close to true prophecy, only a beast’s crude approximation, but it was more than most men would ever be allowed to know.

It insisted.

The unyielding dragon of the coast, king of rigid order and endless reparation, possessed a dominion as inflexible as his judgment. So long as he followed the letter of his soul’s every law, he could impose those same restrictions upon the people around him as if they were their own load-bearing pillars. And should they break those pillars, he could take from them until that wrong was made right.

It took its chances.

The hollow shell of a good man, king of what was left behind, possessed a dominion as broken as his spirit. Vacuous where there had once been purpose, empty where there had once been light. He was barely a remnant now, rail-thin and haunted by his worst mistake, the only one that mattered-

He was spinning away from his fight to stare at the pillar of coronating light. His dull eyes were wide, tracing it to its source. They settled on me, and from the void of his soul an emotion reared up with startling intensity - outrage.

Reaching out.

Ptolemy the Savior roared, and from the empty void of his dominion came light. Spilling out, bolstering him as he had not been bolstered since the day he turned his back on-

Transgressing-

“JUST ONCE!”

I looked down on the Sword Song, as I looked down upon the entirety of the Half-Step City and its petty warring Tyrants. As I looked down upon my brother, and even upon myself.

We were all so very small.

“For once in your miserable life!” Elissa screamed, her spirit - her ego - cracking like glass. It would only take a glancing blow to shatter it. “Tell me the truth! Who are you!? Why are you here!? What could possibly be worth this madness!?”

Hers wasn’t the only spirit at its limit. The King's Curse cut them all to their cores, flaying them open and exposing their hearts. I saw how close to breaking every one of our companions was, and more than that, I saw how much closer to the brink my trio was compared to Sol’s. I had burned them. I had pulled their hands into the fire, and I had held them there in the hopes that they would learn. But I hadn’t taught them anything in the end.

I had only made them suffer.

How much time had passed since I’d drawn my blade? It felt like weeks, inundated as I was in this terrible awareness, but it couldn’t have been more than seconds. The King's Curse drank ravenously from my heart. By its own measure, it had taken another six hundred years from me since our senses had been joined.

Who was I, really?

It devoured me, and it reached beyond me to devour everything else within the city.

Why was I here?

It hungered for the ruins. It hungered for the corpses. It hungered for the living, no matter their standing. Animals. Slaves. Citizens, Philosophers, and Heroes. Even the Tyrants. Even the-

What could possibly be worth all that I had done?

“My name is Lio Aetos.” I stepped forward, and Elissa skittered back. “I am the Young Griffon of the Rosy Dawn, the first and only heir of Damon Aetos.”

The King's Curse sank its teeth into their denial and their doubt, consuming their black biles without hesitation.

“I have climbed twelve steps towards divinity. Soon, I’ll climb a dozen more.”

Whatever the King's Curse could perceive, it could present in stark clarity. I saw all of it, all at once, even as I was consumed. Yet, as I fell fully into the horizon of its insatiable desire, I realized there was one thing even the King’s Curse could not fully understand.

“Liar!” Elissa accused me one last time, while an existence like shadows swimming beneath a frozen lake hovered just over her shoulder.

“Liar!” Lefteris named me while his heart broke apart. Just behind him, close enough to whisper but too far to be touched, an existence like morning mist lingered.

“Liar,” Kyno denied me while his hopes withered away. Lurking behind him almost like his crocodile cloak, a presence loomed like a mirage.

“No.”

I took another step. My heart’s blood dwindled.

Now that I had noticed one, I noticed them all. Watching, whispering, waiting - but never ever helping. There was one for every Hero in the city.

“No,” a sonorous voice echoed my sentiment, only half a step away.

There was even one for me.

“His virtuous heart won’t tolerate a lie,” Melpomene declared with powerful satisfaction. Her voice emanated seemingly without a source, giving lie to her true intent as she reached out for my heart. Abruptly, I understood. She wouldn’t reveal herself in full until she had her prize in hand.

The veil of the Muse’s mystique was impossible to pierce. Even to the King's Curse, she was hardly more than a shifting haze. The blade couldn’t lay her bare like it had everything else.

But it could still see her.

And what it could see, it could consume.

Presumptuous waste of accursed higher power.

[My virtuous heart is MINE.]

My pneuma doubled and redoubled, driven to advancement by the appearance of a golden ideal. Sparks flew inside my soul, the King's Curse consuming all of them as they fell. All of them but one.

As that lonely spark fell and the Flame’s golden ichor caught fire in my veins, the blood staining my hands rose up from my skin and latched onto the sword’s hilt, spinning the blade around and sideways through the empty air.

Melpomene, Tragedy’s Muse, stared at the bronze blade buried in her stomach with something like disbelief. The world itself seemed to hold its breath, unable to reconcile the truth of my reaction. Then the King's Curse began its hungry work, and she threw her head back and screamed.

Across the city, every hero with Melpomene’s fingerprints on their heart fell like puppets with their strings cut, convulsing and crying out in sympathetic agony. The heavenly chorus of heaven’s gleeful spectators turned to shrieking fury as the Tragic Muse’s seven sisters converged on me like falling stars. They cut me with blades I didn’t have the slightest hope of understanding, let alone deflecting. They pierced me to my deepest core, beyond even my blade’s ability to expose me. They questioned all that I was and could ever be, and they declared my soul unworthy.

Who are you to touch our flesh? You are nothing. You are no one.

They sentenced me to death, condemning me to the Fates.

“NO.”

They were rejected.

A broad and heavy hand came down on my shoulder and gripped it tight, less than flesh but more than an apparition. As abruptly as the Muses had made themselves known - no, more so, because he truly hadn’t been there before this exact moment - the echo of a man loomed suddenly large over my shoulder. Facing away from me, one hand covering his face, his memory alone was a stark brand upon the world.

He wore a cloak of shining stars, and when he spoke the entirety of the Free Mediterranean stopped its heart to listen.

“NEVER NOTHING. NEVER NO ONE.” The voice of an era rang out across the heavens, shaking all who heard it.

The legacy of the Conqueror dared the world to prove him wrong, his declaration echoing with pride.

“THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.”

The Muses wailed and flung themselves away, scattering and converging on the Heroes arrayed before me. Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, and Anastasia arched up like they’d been struck by lightning, their minds coming apart as their terror warred with the deafening urges of their Muses.

Golden heat surged to life behind my eyes and spilled forth in a torrent. Melpomene wrenched herself off my blade, sobbing in pain, and I allowed her to flee back to wherever it was that higher powers festered. I strode forward, shrugging off the hand on my shoulder, and the Conqueror’s stark reminder chuckled as it dispersed.

I had less than a century left, my heart’s blood all but depleted, and Prometheus’ golden ichor had been reduced by half before it started burning. Yet as I advanced, I felt the King's Curse withdraw its hunger from my soul until only a fraction of the burden remained - I understood intuitively that I had been paying a pretender’s price for my presumption up until this moment. Now, I suffered only the portion of the wanton blade’s hunger that even the Conqueror hadn’t been able to escape. The inescapable curse that plagued every king.

Now, the blade turned its full hunger upon its surroundings and inverted the balance of its efforts. It reached out to devour the people around me, heedless of their standing.

As if I would allow that.

Rosy flames erupted up and down the bronze blade, bolstered by burning ichor and defiant of its name. The blade absorbed it readily, but the fire fought viciously, and there was always more to take its place. Unable to pierce through the flames entirely, and unwilling to bite back at me, the King's Curse condensed its hunger to a practical burning edge.

The Heroes wavered as I came, on the edge of giving up entirely. If I desired it, I could end this without a fight. We could leave them here, broken and lost, and seek our answers elsewhere. It was the only good option remaining, really. I had lost more in less than a minute than most men would ever have to give, but I still had enough of my heart’s blood left to live for decades more to come. Combined with the Flame’s priceless golden ichor, I could leave this place stronger than any sophist had a right to be.

I could save this gift for a moment where it mattered, when my life was on the line again. These people weren’t a threat to me anymore. They were broken now, and they knew it as well as I did.

No.

Forty hands of my violent intent rose up around me, ten invisible to the naked eye, ten glowing rosy-bright, ten crackling with tribulation lightning, and ten stained by my scarlet sin. My eyes blazed as I burnt away another year of what few I had remaining, and those pankration hands multiplied four fold.

I wasn’t finished yet.

“I came here to answer a question. One that I was too afraid to ask, and one my virtuous heart already knew.”

The distant mountain and the glowing stadium shook as their despots and their gladiators finally reacted to the Conqueror’s curse. If our companions didn’t break on their own, the coming storm would surely do the work for them.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I decided. “I was born into a world of tarnished iron, but I refuse to die in one as well. No matter what it takes, I will make it golden-bright again. And when I do, you’ll see that you’ve always had a place within it.”

“What are you even saying?” Elissa breathed. I huffed a laugh. I supposed that was fair.

Enough sophistry. No more iron truths. No more golden lies.

I leveled my burning blade at their hearts, and the heavenly hands that held them tight.

“Higher power is a curse - your Muses aren’t worth the burden of their favor. You have to cut them out.”

“Or what?” Lefteris challenged me hysterically.

Sol appeared by my side. Selene’s shoulder bumped against mine. We burned and burned.

“Or I’ll break your chains myself,” I promised them.

Our heroic companions rose up to oppose us, and we met them side-by-side.

1.134 [Son of Scarlet Sin]

I watched the dawn break over scarlet waves. The sinful tang of sacred wine coated my tongue.

Four years old. I was so small that holding my cup with both hands was a necessity as much as it was an act of reverence, the wide-rimmed skyphos comically large compared to me. While the rest of the hopeful initiates and senior mystikos waded out several stades into the Ionian, I stood just deep enough for the ebbing sea to wet my feet. When the gentle waves came in, they crested at my waist.

The kykeon burned, branding my throat and searing my insides as I swallowed it down. I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the sudden bleeding of the rosy-fingered dawn. Each time I opened my eyes the effect was worse than before. I swayed, and the next gentle wave nearly knocked me off my feet.

Cultivators in scarlet and white silks hovered around me, far enough away that they could claim it was coincidence but close enough to give their anxiety away. Even I could tell they wanted to take the cup from my hands and hoist me up into their arms. Some of them even reached out to do just that before remembering themselves and pulling away.

I had been a Civic cultivator for less than a year, but my father would not allow any man, woman, or child to take part in his cult’s holy rites unless they did so under their own power. His son was no exception.

I held on to my too large cup of sacred wine, drinking it stubbornly down. I was only four years old, hardly capable of understanding even before the potent wine had stuffed my head full of cotton and fuzz. All I knew was that this was a challenge. I would overcome it.

A wave came rolling into shore that was taller than the rest, if only by a bit. I was forced to thrust my cup up high above my head lest the seawater taint its sacred contents. I saved the kykeon, but the wave bowled me over. I fell.

A strong arm wrapped around me and a firm chest pressed against my back, steadying me. I looked back, aghast at the betrayal, and Nikolas Aetos pressed a finger to his lips.

“I won’t tell Uncle if you don’t.” His blue eyes were bright in the rosy light of dawn, his smile mischievous. The cultivators that had been fretting anxiously nearby breathed quiet sighs of relief, returning their full focus to the rights.

“Cheater,” I accused him. The word was slurred by spirit wine and a child’s clumsy tongue. Niko flicked my nose.

“Foolish little Lio. I’m only following their example - even in a place like this, brothers stand side by side.”

The brightest jewel of the Rosy Dawn’s young generation winked, and then he attacked my unprotected sides with cruel tickling fingers. More than a few of the gathered mystikos turned their heads away to hide their smiles as I tried and failed to fight him off while holding my cup steady over my head.

The rest of the procession was a wine-drunk blur. When it came to the initiation rites of the Rosy Dawn, only the beginning and the end truly mattered.

My father didn’t take me into the crook of his arm as he had before, when he’d brought me down into the mountain depths alone. I walked through torch-lit tunnels under my own power, surrounded by the members of my father’s faith. I saw the story of the Rosy Dawn’s greater mystery painted on the walls and acted out by cultivators in blank theater masks and luminous cloaks.

I forged ahead through a child’s heavy fatigue, determined to the end. And finally, I was rewarded for my efforts.

I saw-

Half a scarlet sun, shining blindingly bright in the heart’s broken cradle. Beating, somehow still beating-

-half of a corpse that defied all description. The harder I looked, the less I understood it.

I watched the sun rise in the corpse’s hand, surrounded by the members of my faith. When they began to funnel out of the cavernous room on some unspoken understanding, I followed them.

My father laid a hand on my shoulder, rooting me in place. It was the first time he had acknowledged me since the beginning of the rites.

We stayed there while my newly enlightened juniors, my seniors, and even my aunts and uncles filed out one by one. Soon enough only three of us remained there with the corpse - my father, myself, and Niko. The latter fidgeted in place, excited and bashful in a way I had never seen him before. When the last of the fading torch light was gone from the mouths of the tunnels, he looked expectantly to my father.

Damon Aetos smiled faintly. He reached out to grasp the empty air above the corpse, drawing it back like he was pulling aside a curtain, and-

A woman appeared on the cavern floor.

“Mother!” Niko’s joyful cry split the solemn silence of the cavern in two. He rushed out from my father’s shadow and threw himself into the woman’s open arms. She accepted him gladly, wrapping him up in a mother’s warm embrace.

Even reclining as she was, it was clear the woman was enormous. She was taller than any woman I had ever seen, taller than both of my uncles - even taller than my father. Her physique was cut from the same cloth as my aunts, powerful, defined, yet gracefully beautiful, as though the sculptor responsible for her creation had smoothed away the harsh edges that men like my father and my uncles carried with them everywhere. She was to my aunts as my aunts were to the rest of the city’s marble beauties.

Her smile was bright enough to blind me, her voice more pleasant than a song bird’s as she cooed over her son. Her eyes were the color of scarlet dawn, and twin flames burned merrily behind them. Her hair was thick and long, pooling like a golden halo around her head. Her skin was tanned so that she looked perpetually flushed. She was joy and vitality personified.

The golden breastplate she wore as comfortably as court silks had a gaping hole blasted through its center. Blood flowed freely from the crater.

“And who might you be?”

I looked up from it, somehow guilty, like I’d been caught in a sinful act. There was no accusation in her eyes, though. Only warmth.

“I’m the Young Aristocrat.” My name didn’t feel good enough for someone like this. The woman’s smile deepened, and her eyes crinkled fondly.

“Liar. You’re my little Lio, aren’t you? I’ve been waiting so long to meet you.” She took one arm from her son and held it out for me. “Come closer, dear heart- I want to see your face.” Her blood pooled in the cavern up to my ankles, making an island of the broken dais that the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god lounged upon. Now that my father had lifted the veil, I could see the corpse’s hand wasn’t hanging limp, but instead resting on the crown of the woman’s head.

“Come on, Lio,” Niko urged me, holding out an arm of his own. I hesitated, waiting, though for what I wasn’t sure.

“Enough of these theatrics, Damon,” the woman chided. My father chuckled.

“As you wish.” He lifted his hand from my shoulder.

Niko grinned and his mother laughed delightedly as I ran into their arms.

——

The fire burned and burned. I fought to get away from it, snarling like a cornered animal as the merciless flame boiled the flesh of my hands from my bones. My feet scrabbled and kicked at the forest debris, but they couldn’t kick enough dirt into the fire to put it out. I sank my teeth into the arms holding me firmly in place. They couldn’t even break the skin.

When my father finally let go of my hands, I tried to fling myself away from the fire I had so carefully built myself. I ran into an unbreakable wall. Sitting as I was in my father’s lap, I still couldn’t escape. His chest was at my back, his arms and legs walling off either side. There was only one way.

I dove through the fire, hitting the ground on the other side of it and rolling through the grass.

My hands were a grotesque sight. As I stared at them, the animal fury drained out of me and my chest began to heave. Small, wretched noises of pain bubbled up in my throat.

“Stand,” my father commanded. I had to brace my elbows against the dirt while I got my feet under me. I stood, fighting panicked gasps. My father looked down on me from across the fire, as pitiless as the flame.

“This heat is justice,” he told me. He hadn’t drawn his own hands from the fire. “If it burns you, it’s your own lack that’s to blame.”

I sniffed. “It hurts.”

“Refinement always does.”

——

The next time I saw the woman I was five years old. I ran side-by-side with Niko into her warm embrace, burying my face in her hair and basking in her presence. She accepted us both gladly, and showered us with praise.

“My, my, who is this shining star? Your father would be spitting blood if he could see you now - he used to brag up and down that he’d spoil his son with refining treasures, and here you are growing like a weed without him!”

In the year that had passed between our first and second meeting, Niko had transcended the Civic Realm and then advanced a step further than that to the second rank of the Sophic Realm. Meanwhile, I was still a first rank Citizen.

The Rosy Dawn’s initiates praised me readily and often for being a cultivator at all. That I had been awoken to my soul so very young was a good omen beyond good omens, they assured me. My star was surely destined to rise.

“And look at you,” Niko’s mother whispered, stroking my head. “Your hair’s grown so long. If your legs don’t grow to match it soon, you’ll be dragging it behind you like a cloak. Ah-! Don’t cut it though. You were meant to have long hair, I can tell.”

I tightened my arms around her as she went back to praising Niko, needling him for the details of his advancement. I wanted her to praise me more, but I knew I didn’t deserve it.

Niko had grown by leaps and bounds without a father’s hand to guide him.

What was my excuse?

——

The fire burned and burned. I curled my fingers watching it twist and dance between them. The pain was still there, sharp as it had ever been, but it was only a memory. It couldn’t hurt me now.

I stepped away from my father into the flame, turned on my heel, and sat down inside of it. I looked up expectantly while the fire burnt my clothes away.

He nodded once.

“Now we can begin.”

——

The next time I saw the golden woman, Niko and I had each advanced twice. She wasn’t astounded as my fellow mystikos had been, and her praise was measured by comparison, but for some reason it made my ears burn and my chest ache with pride. I drank it in, like I was dying of thirst and every word was water.

Her blood kept flowing. It pooled around my knees.

——

“I want to learn the sword,” I told my father one day, while he poured over the business of the kyrios in his office. The sheathed sword hung there on the wall above his head as it always had, ornate and proud in its place of prominence.

“Then learn it.”

“I want you to teach me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He never once looked up.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

——

Over time, the golden woman’s complexion had lost its perpetual flush. Her eyes burned as bright as they ever had and her smile was just as vibrant, but on our next visit my father pulled us away sooner than he had before.

——

I practiced on my own. First, with a clumsy wooden sword that I had carved myself, then, with a stolen sword from the junior mystikos’ armory.

I scoured the written texts available to someone of my stature for their techniques, and only once I had exhausted every path forward did I turn to the old wisemen charged with instructing me.

“You- I’m sorry, young Aetos, what did you say?”

The man was an accomplished cultivator by most metrics, closer to my uncles than he was to me. He looked far younger than he really was, and he acted like it too. Surrounded by papyrus scrolls in the center of a ransacked library, the disheveled Philosopher looked like a frazzled junior initiate more than an honored elder.

I asked him again. He smiled, setting aside his scrolls. The gesture felt wrong, somehow.

“If you’ll accept this lowly sophist’s wisdom, it would be my honor to show you what I know.” That said, the wiseman pulled a sword from a fold in his attire far too small to accommodate it. I brushed my odd feeling aside. “First, observe my grip.”

I studied until he had nothing left to teach me, and then I moved on to the next of my mentors. I consumed all that they had to give, and when I was done I sought practical experience in the gymnasium. I toiled, and I learned, until finally there was no one left on the eastern mountain range to teach me - none but Niko and the stalwart pillars of the Rosy Dawn.

My aunts and uncles smiled and patted my head, praising me for my work ethic, and the gestures felt as odd as they had in my tutor’s hectic library. In the end, though they lavished me with kind words, each of them turned me away and told me to seek out my father instead. Niko readily offered to train with me when he could, but he was all too often wrapped up in private lessons with my father and our aunts and uncles.

I asked my father again to teach me how to use a sword.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

Again he told me no.

——

“My boys,” the golden mother sighed, content now that she had us in her arms. “It’s been too long. Tell me all about it.”

“I learned how to shoot a bow on horseback,” I offered up.

“Ho? And was the horse moving?” she asked, amused.

“It was galloping.” I pointed at a glittering gemstone embedded in the far side of the corpse god’s cavern, smaller than my fingernail. “My target was smaller than that, and ten times further away.”

Her scarlet eyes widened just the slightest bit. It was a greater reward than all of the praise heaped upon me by my peers.

“My, my, that is impressive. Did you have time for anything else?”

Nestled against her other side, Niko laughed.

——-

I practiced archery. I practiced the javelin. I practiced the spear, and the axe, and the sling. I learned how to use every weapon in the armories, and I did not stop until I was better than the best of my peers in their use. I went further than that, spent my nights and my days toiling in the academic pursuits expected of a Young Aristocrat.

I tried everything under the sun, and then I asked my father again.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

“Liar.”

Finally, my father looked up from his work. His blue eyes were narrow. His expression was flinty.

“I’ve done nothing but refine myself, worked harder than any of my peers!”

“You haven’t done enough.”

“When will it be enough!?” I shouted.

He rose from behind his desk, towering over me. I lifted my chin, glaring up at my Tyrant father.

“You demand I show you how to run when you have yet to even walk.” He rounded the table, and as he did he shrugged his fine silks off his shoulders, letting them hang down around his waist. “A sword is a weapon, and a weapon is a tool - they exist to do what your body cannot do alone.”

He made a fist to show me what was coming. I leapt away and he struck me regardless. I tumbled across the marble floor, bouncing off of the office’s far wall.

“You tempered your body in flame, and only then did you call upon the rosy-fingered dawn. This is just the same.” My father dragged me up off the floor by my neck, heedless of my thrashing. “You’re on your feet. Now walk.”

He threw me down again, but I didn’t hit the marble floor of his office. Sand filled my mouth and the midday sun beat down on my back. When I looked up I saw clear skies and the empty stands of the Scarlet Stadium.

“The gods gave you a weapon the day that you were born,” my father declared, stalking through the sand pit towards me. I rose up into a defensive crouch. “You can play with knives after you’ve mastered your body’s full potential.”

I spat blood and a baby tooth onto the sand.

“Teach me,” I demanded.

The kyrios assumed a stance.

“Attend.”

—-

Niko told his golden mother about all the plans he had made, and all the places he intended to go before he died. I told her about pankration, and all the ways I had learned to wield my body like a blade. She listened patiently to us both, content as always. As the years had passed, we had returned each time with more and more to say. It was only natural she’d say less and less in turn.

Her smile was as warm as it had been the very first time, but her fingers were cool as they cupped each of our cheeks.

“You’re both too big for this place,” she told us fondly.

The blood was up to my waist.

——

The absence of the Aetos family’s second pillar was an aching wound, keenly felt but never prodded. Anargyros Aetos had been the kind of man that was worth telling stories of, all too easy to admire and all but impossible to hate. Knowing that, it was easy enough for even a child to understand why the brothers Aetos and their wives so heavily favored Anargyros’ only son.

Niko was his father’s living legacy, and I loved him as much as my aunts and uncles did - as much as my father did. It made sense to me that the two of us were treated differently.

It wasn’t until I saw that same dissonance in the treatment of my younger cousins that I began to wonder.

It was perhaps only natural for Uncle Stavros and Aunt Raisa to dote over Heron and Myron, just as it was natural for Uncle Fotios and Aunt Chryse to fawn over Lydia, Castor, and Rena. These were their children.

But why, then, did Uncle Stavros make time to teach little Rena how to ride a horse when he had never had a moment to spare for me? Why did Aunt Raisa forgo her ancestral place in the pyanopsia to help Castor with his leading role, when before she had watched me play that same part alone? Why would Uncle Fotios teach Heron how to hunt and skin a deer, when I had always been too impatient to take along? Why would Aunt Chryse shower little Myron with gifts whenever she saw his face, when she had only ever gifted me a smile?

It was petulant, just as it had been petulant for me to desire the golden mother’s praise without doing anything deserving of it. I put it to the side in favor of more important things.

I refined myself in body and soul, ever pursuing Niko’s distant example. I scoured my father’s cult and his city both in search of new experiences - new skills to learn, new stories to be told, new challenges to overcome. It was only ever enough to keep pace with the shining gem of the young pillars, and never for long. The more that I devoured, the less I had to gain.

Niko had all the same opportunities at hand as I did, as a Young Aristocrat in all but name, and he had the instruction of his uncles and aunts in addition to the rest. I would stagnate long before he did. I would starve before he’d fully hit his stride.

I could have hated him for it, I supposed. But why would I hate him when the chase had brought me this far already?

I was having fun.

Along the way, our numbers grew. While Niko spent more and more time behind closed doors with his aunts and uncles, I found myself with tagalongs of my own.

There was Lydia, quietly seeking my company whenever she had time away from her parents and the duties of a Young Mistress. There was Heron, bright-eyed and brash, bragging that he was my right hand to anyone who would listen. There was Castor, flighty and a bit frail, drifting my way when the rigors of his martial training wore him down to dust. There was Rena, sweeter than honey, seeking me out to say hello and lingering long after just for the sake of it.

And of course, there was Myron. Cherubic and boundlessly energetic, too young to cultivate, but just old enough to know his family and want to seek them out. More often than not, Heron would have him riding on his shoulders when he came charging in to disrupt my day.

They hindered far more often than they helped, trailing behind me like ducklings, but I didn’t mind. They were all of them dear to me, and that was worth the hours wasted. After everything that Niko had done for me, how could I do any less for all of them?

The more time we spent together, the more apparent the differences in how we were treated became. It went beyond our aunts and uncles. The indulgent smiles of the honored elders and the vacuous praise of the Rosy Dawn’s mystikos, the odd dissonance that I had no name or face for, ended at my feet. I watched gushing praise temper itself into pride, sometimes in a single breath as a scholar turned from me to address one of my cousins. I watched, and I wondered what it was I was seeing in their eyes. What I could hear in all their voices.

I could have hated my cousins for that, as I could have hated Niko. But why would I hate them when they were the only ones aside from Niko and his golden mother that didn’t treat me this way?

We grew together, chasing distant stars and carving kingdoms of our own out of our mountain home. I did my best to guide them, to make strengths out of their faults, and pull them up to join me. My refinement slowed as a result, falling by slight degrees behind Niko’s pace.

It was enough.

——

I was ten years old, heart hammering in anticipation as the last of the initiates vanished through the tunnels on their way back to the surface of the mountain. The rites were over. I glanced at Niko, and he winked back at me.

Then my father turned and walked away from the bisected corpse.

“Father-!”

“Uncle-!”

“Be silent,” the kyrios commanded. Both our mouths were shut. We could only stare at him, and then each other, utterly aghast. Our lips wouldn’t have formed the words even if we had known how to convince him.

“Damon.”

Thankfully, we didn’t have to.

“Let me see my boys.”

My father stood with his back to us, silent as a grave. The muscles of his shoulders flexed and coiled, a promise of unspeakable violence.

“As you wish.” Without looking back, he reached out and drew the curtain aside. Then, unprecedentedly, he stepped into the central tunnel and left the cavern entirely, leaving us alone with a bleeding woman and a corpse.

The golden mother smiled brightly and beckoned us toward her.

I waded through her blood and wrapped my arms tight around her. She returned the hug with all her strength. For the first time, my grip was tighter than hers.

“I’m not a boy anymore, mother,” Niko said lightly, embracing her other side. Was he blind? Did he not have eyes to see how pale she had become? She was weaker than she’d ever been, cold to the touch where before she’d been warm. Why was he smiling?

“You’ll always be my boys,” she said, stroking frail fingers through my hair and guiding Niko’s head down to press his brow to hers.

“Even when we have children of our own?” Niko needled her. She chuckled. Her eyes closed.

No. I was wrong.

“When that day comes, you’ll understand exactly what I mean.”

All this time, I had been the blind one.

Niko carried on teasing his golden mother with unshed tears in his eyes, his voice steady as a stone. Of course he knew. He had known all along. My father had known, too. I was the only one that had been seeking refuge in my ignorance.

If she could bleed out for five years, why not for five more? Why not forever?

Of course that couldn’t be the case. Why had I let myself believe it?

“What of you, Lio?” She murmured when Niko had finished telling her his stories. “A year has passed since last we spoke. What have you made of it?” I’d come here with a thousand answers to that question. I reached out and couldn’t find a single one.

“Nothing.”

Burning scarlet eyes cracked open, searching my face. The golden woman pulled me gently - weakly - closer. She planted a kiss upon my brow.

“I doubt that,” she said softly. “But well enough. What will you do with the year ahead of you?”

I’d come with a thousand answers for that question too, and all of them turned to smoke when I reached out to grasp them. I reached further, desperate, and finally found one. An answer that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m going to save you,” I decided.

“The audacity,” Niko lamented. It was a faint thing, since he’d turned his face away from us both.

“Oh, dear heart,” the golden mother regarded me fondly, and without any real hope. “You’ve already saved me in every way that matters.”

It wasn’t good enough.

——

I wasn’t good enough.

I tore through everything at my disposal in the Scarlet City, and when that well ran dry I reached beyond my station. I stole my peers’ ancestral knowledge, piled high the scriptures passed down to them by their fathers and their father’s father’s before them, and found nothing worth the insult I’d given them. I climbed the western mountain range and dared Gianni Scala to kill me while I hounded his initiates for their knowledge. I searched high and I searched low, and I did all of it for nothing.

I wasn’t good enough, but they were all worthless.

My little cousins followed me wherever they could, and in my manic obsession I allowed them each to do it. To them, it was all the same adventure.

My uncles and aunts were another matter entirely.

As the days slipped away from me, and I chafed harder and harder against the boundaries of my father’s city, my aunts and uncles drew my cousins further from my reach. It was nothing I could point to and say there, that was the moment. They simply filled their children’s days with tasks at odds with my purpose, bit by bit, until one day I found myself alone again.

That same day, I marched into the private courtyard where my aunts and uncles trained Niko in secret, and I cast my ugly iron sword down at my cousin’s feet.

I challenged him to trial by hunger. Suddenly, I was more than worth the full attention of my uncles and aunts.

Niko bent and picked the ugly sword up by its blade, offering the hilt back to me.

“You don’t have to fight me for my favor, cousin,” he said sadly. “Just ask.”

“I don’t need your favor.” I took the sword and leveled it behind him. “I need theirs.”

I saw a glimpse of it then, but it was gone from their faces before I could describe it. That nauseating vertigo rose up in its place.

“Don’t be silly, nephew,” Fotios chuckled. “You’re our brother’s son. You’ve always had our favor.”

“You worry too much,” Raisa chided me fondly.

“Just like your father,” Chryse teased.

Stavros only scoffed and patted my head.

It was too much. Any more and I would vomit.

Our uncles and aunts went quiet as I settled into a swordsman’s stance.

“It’s alright,” Niko said, drawing his own gleaming blade and tapping it to mine. “I accept.”

I called upon every ounce of my strength, all that I had built within my soul, and I struck faster than I ever had before.

Niko struck me down.

I rose, quicker this time, lunging up from the unexpected angle to deliver a cruel strike to-

Niko struck me down.

I rose, spitting blood.

Niko struck me down.

I rose, twice and twice again more determined than before.

Niko struck me down.

I rose.

I fell.

I rose.

My ugly iron blade shattered in my hands, leaving me with nothing but my rage.

A shadow fell over me while I pounded my fists against the dirt. My uncle’s voice was a sympathetic rumble. It made me want to scream.

“Let this be a lesson, nephew. Skill and strength-of-arms go hand in hand - pig iron like that won’t be enough to bridge a gap this wide.”

With that, he clapped me on the back and rose. They left me there with my anger, taking Niko with them.

—

I couldn’t bear looking at her. I cradled the golden mother’s right hand in both of my own, and pressed my forehead down into her palm. Her blood pooled cold around my chest.

“It isn’t your fault,” Niko quietly assured me. He reached across the weeping crater in his mother’s chest to grip the back of my neck - his hand was broad and warm. “If Uncle Damon couldn’t do it, you can hardly blame yourself for falling short.”

I grit my teeth.

“Dear heart.” Her voice was whisper-thin, now. “I can’t bear to see you bleeding like this. Look at me, let me see your face.”

Worthless. Wretched. Niko’s mother was dying, and I was forcing them to comfort me.

“I promised you.” I made myself confess it, though my voice was ugly and raw. I forced myself to raise my head and meet her eyes, though my own swam with bitter tears. “I promised.”

Steam rose from her scarlet eyes, water turned to vapor by the flames behind them. I realized the golden mother was crying.

“Oh, Lio. You can’t afford to care this much. This world won’t tolerate such weakness.” She smiled in spite of her sorrow, or perhaps because of it. Her cool thumb stroked my cheek. “But I love that about you, too.”

It would have hurt less if she’d stabbed me.

——

I refined myself. I searched for answers. I waited.

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

The sword was heavier than it looked. I laid it across my father’s desk, tracing my fingers reverently along its sheath. On one side, the sheath had been inscribed with a master crafter’s precision and an artist’s skilled design. The bladehouse mural depicted five terrible monsters and five men - or rather, the same man five times - striking them down.

My whole life I had wondered what was on the other side, the one that faced the wall. I turned the sheath over on the table and I saw that same man five times more. Instead of fighting monsters, though, he was fighting crowned kings.

This was the blade of the late Anargyros. This sheathe was his story.

I took the sword’s well-worn hilt in hand, and felt a sensation that was foreign to me now that I’d been free of it for nearly half my life.

I was burning.

I knew then that this was right. If this couldn’t bridge the gap between Niko and I, then no sword ever would. I forced aside my body’s instinctive desire to let it go, to flinch away in animal panic. I forced myself to draw the blade.

The moment I saw the first sliver of that blade, I knew I’d underestimated it. I could do more than win the support of my uncles and aunts with this. I could challenge my father directly. I could go beyond him and do what he should have done already.

I could strike down death itself.

I could save her-

“STOP!”

Niko appeared from thin air, flying through the veranda into my father’s office and striking me like a spear. He held nothing back. I heard three of my ribs break before I hit the marble floor. My uncle’s blade slammed back fully into its hilt and flew out of my hands, skittering across the marble tiles.

I choked, arching up and gasping desperately for air. I was hurt in a dozen places, bleeding where the back of my head had broken through a dining table. Somehow, though I inhaled enough air to make my broken ribs scream, it only scalded the burns inside of me.

Niko hauled me up and slapped me hard across the face.

“Are you out of your mind!?” he shouted at me. He slapped my other cheek with the back of his hand, splitting my eyelid with the force of it. “Do you have any idea what you had in your hands!?”

Niko shook me like a dog, more furious than I had ever seen him.

“You would have died!” he raged. “Do you understand that!? Are you listening? If I’d been a moment slower you would be dead!”

His voice hounded me even as I slipped away to darkness. It hunted me through my dreams.

When I woke up, I was mended.

I sat up cautiously on the plush dining couch, bracing for pain that did not come. I was still in my father’s office. It had been full night when I lost consciousness, and now the horizon was light with the promise of predawn. Niko was gone, and his father’s sword was back up on its wall.

My father stood in front of his desk, arms crossed, and my uncle knelt stoically in the center of the room.

“My son lives,” Damon Aetos rumbled.

Stavros Aetos inclined his head. “I’m glad.”

I turned my head and vomited on the marble floor. My uncle’s nose wrinkled in distaste. My father’s expression didn’t change at all.

“May I be excused?” I ground out once the heaving had passed.

“No.”

I spat the last of the bile from my mouth. “Then punish me if you’re going to punish me. I’m not sorry, and I don’t regret it.”

I saw it again. Just the briefest glimpse of that something that my uncle didn’t want me to see. It was gone as quick as it came.

“You learned your lesson in the act,” my father declared. His expression was level as he looked me up and down. “You’ve been punished twice over - that much is justice.”

“Then why can’t I go?”

In lieu of an answer, my father turned cold blue eyes back down to his brother.

“How many times do I have to say it, Damon?” Stavros spoke impatiently. “I tried to give the boy advice, and he ran away with it. A tragic misunderstanding is still just a misunderstanding.”

“Lio.” My father demanded my attention, and I had no choice but to oblige him. “How does a blacksmith expose the truth within a blade?”

I thought of the ugly iron blade I had forged in secret. In the end, it had only been strong enough to withstand a few of Niko’s blows, but even that had only been possible after days and days of trial and refinement.

Confused, I answered, “He treats it with heat.”

My father nodded shallowly.

“Men are much the same.”

I followed his gaze down to my uncle.

“Heat reveals both strength and imperfection,” the kyrios explained. “Whichever it may be, the truth is found in flames.”

I followed his intent.

“You knew that I would try to take it,” I realized. My uncle scoffed, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

“Don’t be foolish, nephew.”

“You wanted me to die.” It felt ridiculous to say it, but it didn’t feel wrong.

“Ridiculous. You’re the blood of my own brother - I couldn’t wish for your death any more than I could wish for your father’s. For my own.”

I watched intently as Stavros Aetos drew himself up in righteous indignation, and I recognized that maddening dissonance for what it really was.

A lie.

“You hate me.”

“How could I hate you?”

“You can’t stand the sight of me.”

His jaw clenched in a ferocious scowl.

“You wish your children hated me too,” I accused him. Finally, my uncle spat an oath and stood.

“I’ve had enough of this. Play your games with someone else, brother-“

“Sit,” the kyrios commanded. My uncle’s knees hit the floor.

“Why?” I slid off of the lounge, advancing forward with my fists clenched at my sides. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Stavros snapped. “If you’d only listen-“

Treat it with heat.

“Is it because you’re the youngest?” I lashed out scathingly. He looked at me in disbelief. “Do you resent me for my status? Is it because you think Niko would serve better in my place? That your son would serve better than me - or perhaps that you would serve better than my father?”

“Watch your mouth, boy,” my uncle warned me.

“Is it envy, or is it fear? Do I terrify you, uncle? Have I haunted your dreams from the moment I could walk?” I mocked him, pressing deeper still. “Hero of heroes, the great Stavros Aetos, driven to delusion by a boy too young to hold a cup of wine-“

The world went white and tilted in its frame. I pushed myself up off the floor, woozy, and touched a hand to my bruised cheek. I looked from my uncle’s bloodied knuckles to my father.

The kyrios met my gaze without concern.

“Did you think it would be painless?”

I growled and forced myself to stand.

“You’re a liar,” I accused my uncle. A moment later, I slammed against my father’s shelves, scattering scrolls of ancient papyrus.

“Enough of this, Damon!” Stavros shouted.

“You’re a coward!” I snapped, vaulting over the desk only to be driven face-first into the floor. My nose broke and gushed scarlet blood onto the priceless marble.

“Be silent!”

“Too afraid to tell me why!”

He buried a fist in my gut, wrapping me around it. I gagged, sucking in a whistling breath, and latched onto his arm.

“Faker,” I hissed, branding him. A snarl twisted his stoic features. Finally, I could see it.

My uncle flung me away from him like I was too hot to touch. I forced myself up once more, my vision darkening around its edges.

“Just say it!” I hollered.

“BE SILENT!”

“For once, if not ever again!”

“DAMON!”

“Tell me what I did to you!”

“You were born!”

I froze in place halfway across the room, abruptly transfixed. The man I’d known as my uncle all my life glared at me with black resentment. His ire rolled off of him in caustic waves.

“You were born,” Stavros told me, “and this world has been a bleaker place ever since. You are all of your father’s worst indulgences with none of his virtues to balance them. The opposite of all your cousins.

“Nikolas is a living memory of his father, my brother, someone I’d trade my life for without hesitation. You are a never ending reminder of my oldest brother’s cruelty. Would that I could forget it. Would that I could forget you.

“That your first instinct was to take my plain advice and use it as an excuse to steal from your own father is the only explanation I need to give. You are a danger to my children, a pox upon my brother’s legacy, and the worst of it is that you aren’t sorry at all.”

My uncle glared down at me and I saw there was nothing left to temper.

“I don’t want you to die. I wish you’d never been born at all.”

Stavros jerked, as if released from invisible shackles, and stormed out of the room. I stared down at the marble floor, watching the blood fall from my broken nose.

“Are you glad?”

“No,” I rasped. My father hummed.

“It would be easier to let sleeping dogs lie. If you desire it, I’ll see that this stays between the three of us. You can return to your life as it was before.”

“No.”

I couldn’t.

——

The initiation rites were still months away when my father gathered me and Niko up for our final farewell.

The golden mother had no strength left to beckon us to her, no strength even to grin. The last warmth left of her was in her eyes. The fires behind them were nought but cooling embers now, yet their passion remained undeniable.

I held her hand in mine carefully, afraid that it would break. The stench of blood and burning smoke brought tears to my eyes.

“There you are,” she breathed. “My sweet boy.”

Overwhelmed, pushed to the limits of my endurance, I did something unforgivable.

“You’re not my mother.”

I tried to temper her.

I regretted it immediately, but she only smiled softly.

“No, but you’re my Lio all the same. Heaven and earth in harmony couldn’t change that.”

I wept furious, anguished tears. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t justice - and if it was, it didn’t deserve to exist. It deserved to be melted down. It deserved to be scoured.

“Dear heart, remember,” my golden mother whispered, while my father pulled me away and Niko stepped in to take my place. “Your origins are -“

——

“- hopelessly grim. But this life is yours to decide,” Sol told me. In his burning eyes I saw the sun. “If your story ends as it began, it’ll be because you chose it.”

He kept moving forward, glory rolling off of him in waves. Leaving me to my broken mask. I inhaled a shuddering breath, taking in the world around me as it broke apart and burned. Steam seethed out from between my clenched teeth.

The world is iron now.

Five Heroic souls blazed at their highest potential, unraveling the laws of nature with their deeds. Arrows made of every material above and below blocked out the stars in the sky. Caustic flames in the shape of hunting hounds raced through the wreckage and melted away whatever they touched. A crocodile the size of three elephants swam through the air like it was water, twisting sinuously and devouring every obstacle put before it.

Every king is a Tyrant. There are no more exceptions.

Sol weaved between them with his spear like a grim conductor. Golden fire blazed behind his eyes, and every motion of his empty hand took hold of the world around him and cast it in a new direction. He guided each of their techniques like they were his, using them against one another, and together with Selene he clashed directly with the Heroes themselves. Their blows cratered the earth and sent shockwaves screaming through the city.

My fingers wrapped around a well-worn hilt and my blood began to boil. Prometheus’ golden ichor went wild in my veins.

In a world like this, a Hero doesn’t have to be the pinnacle.

My brother fought beyond any mortal man’s expectation, burning his heart’s blood to do alone what we should have done together. If it had only been the Heroes up against him, it might have been enough. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t.

Selene twisted in alarm, locked into a statemate she couldn’t escape with the Heroic Huntsman, and screamed a hopeless warning.

“SOLUS!”

My brother turned, casting out his empty hand and blasting a city street away from him. The scarred Heroine rushing into his blindspot was sent flying with the wreckage.

It wasn’t good enough.

An otherworldly chime reverberated throughout the city, a sound so bright and clear that only a Muse’s fingers could have possibly called it forth. In response - no, as her muse had planned all along, the Sword Song’s spirit lunged out of her body and through the ringing sound. Sol realized his error a moment too late - if he could hear her song, she didn’t need a body to cut him down.

He tried anyway. He cast magma through her spirit, diverted a hundred of Lefteris’ arrows to skewer her, and threw his own spear when all else had failed. Elissa passed through it all, the sound of her flashing blade a final killing note.

Scarlet silk whirled into the space between them. I bared my teeth at the Heroine's incorporeal soul. The sound of her shock was like metal pulling itself apart.

In a world like this, a Hero only needs to burn.

I drew my sword and set fire to the night.

1.133 [Note: This is an edited repost]

As the title says, this is the second part of the 10k chapter that I posted earlier last week. I've since decided to split 1.132 into two chapters for future release, and this is the second half of it. Apologies for the false alarm, but this is a more carefully edited version of the chapter you read before. The first half of it, 1.132, has similarly been updated to reflect various grammar and syntax changes. Should be a much smoother read now.

Hoping to have chapter 1.134 published either tomorrow or the day after. As always, thank you for your support. Couldn't do this without you boys. 

'Til then.

----

The Son of Rome

The mask settled with its painted features facing up, angled so that the distraught woman seemed to wail up at its owner. Griffon stared at it in numb despair.

We were out of time.

Scythas appeared in our path, his long hair whipping in the wind. His passage through the storm crown was written all across his frame. Thin, branching scars covered his visible skin, raw red remnants of tribulation wrath. His grass-green cult attire was drenched by blood and rainwater, torn in so many places it hardly looked like a single piece anymore. Far worse than any of those wounds, though, was the look on his face. My heart hammered double-time in my chest.

“Solus,” he said, begging me with broken eyes, “what are you doing?”

Ah.

Selene pushed up from the ground with one arm, the other reaching slowly for her fold in paradox logic where she kept her spear. She eyed the Hero of the Scything Squall carefully. When she spoke, her words were more than just soothing. Whether she did it consciously or not, I tracked the motion of her pneuma as it coated her words and reached out across the gap between them.

“Scythas, this isn’t-“

“Quiet,” he hissed, and stole the wind from her voice. Burning hazel eyes rooted me in place. This time he demanded answers from me. “What is this? What happened to the Oracle? What happened to the alliance? Why are you running away?”

There were more. Five cultivators in the first rank of the Heroic realm converged on us like a closing snare. I exhaled slowly, steadying myself. My heart beat faster still, cold dread warring with golden heat in my chest.

The Heroes arrived one by one. Elissa landed beside Scythas with her bronze blade already drawn. Her scarred face was twisted by furious accusation. Jason landed in a heavy crouch between us and them, the pressure of his panicked pneuma pulverizing every stone within arms reach. The carved stones dangling from his necklaces rattled against his breast plate as he shifted back-and-forth, uncertainty pulling him in two directions.

Kyno touched down lightly beside Elissa, throwing off steam like a forge from his crocodile cloak. The crocodile’s maw hung low, obscuring his eyes. The tightening of his jaw and the clenching of his fists as he looked down at Griffon said more than enough. Anastasia arrived, not from above, but from the side. She came striding out to join us from the shadows of a nearby alley - or what remained of it. A widow’s black veil covered her face. She had her javelin in hand, burning with caustic heat.

Déjà vu tilted the world around me. We were facing opposite directions, but there was no doubt in my mind. It was the same alley, and this was the same pavilion.

“Heaven beats its drums. Are you ready to dance?”

We only needed one more, and we’d be right back where we started.

I pivoted on my heel an instant before Jason shouted a warning. A line of sensation too bright to be painful drew a line across the bridge of my nose, an arrow that screamed to all of my senses piercing through the earth and promptly vanishing. It carried on faster than I could consciously track until it was gone entirely - burrowing past the lower limits of my sphere’s awareness.

Lefteris descended in wrath, cratering the raised dais that the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had hammered their funeral drums on so many weeks ago. The three fingers he used to draw back his bow string were a bloody ruin. He glared down at Griffon and I, not with suspicion or desperation, but with black unfettered hatred.

The Gold-String Guardian drew another arrow from the gap in his own paradox logic, drawing it back without a word. I saw my death in his eyes. I’d only narrowly dodged the first arrow because of the distance and because I had started pivoting the instant I felt his pneuma shift along the bow’s golden string. If he shot me again, I would be hit. If he shifted his target, Griffon wouldn’t even try to dodge. My heart raced faster still.

Jason and Kyno saved us, converging on either side of the Heroic archer and wrestling his bow away from us. Now the archer spoke, howling at the top of his lungs.

“I told you! I told all of you, at every turn, and you didn’t listen!” His heart’s flame blazed as he fought viciously against the two men restraining him. “I’ll kill you! I’ll tear you apart, leave nothing for your wretched soul to scavenge! I’ll grind your bones to dust!”

“I’d like to see you try,” Jason growled, wrenching his bow arm back.

“Just breathe, Left!” Kyno urged him. Even with the difference in their stature, the hulking man in the crocodile skin was struggling to hold back his friend’s nocking arm. “This isn’t the moment! The boys need you to be-“

Lefteris shouted, grieving as much as he was hating. A lead weight settled in my stomach.

“Solus.” Scythas stepped forward. His pneuma was a mess of jumbled currents, a thousand streams converging on his heart. “Speak to us. Tell us what’s going on.”

“As if we didn’t already know.” Elissa leveled her sword at us, glaring down at Griffon, and her anger swiftly boiled over. “They strummed us like a lyre. From the very beginning, they sang and danced and promised us everything under the sun, never once intending to deliver it. They lied to our faces. They used us as tools.”

“Let the man speak!” Jason shouted. The Sword Song rounded on him.

“Enough of barking dogs!”

Scythas took another step towards us - towards me. Selene crept back, crouching protectively beside Griffon. In the corner of my eye, I saw Anastasia pace a wide circle around us.

“This wasn’t your plan,” Scythas spoke, as if he could manifest the truth of it. I shook my head. “Then why? What happened after you left us in the storm? Why didn’t you bring us with you? Why aren’t you fighting?”

Each question brought him a step closer. Each question brought to my attention another golden path that I had overlooked when it mattered the most. I saw them spiraling out in their hundreds behind each of the six Heroic cultivators - how many paths to victory had I overlooked? How many times had I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?

How many lives had I ended in a single day?

“I took you for a wolf,” Anastasia said softly, audible amidst the violent din only because Scythas delivered the words to me. Her black veil glowed caustic green at its edges. “But now I don’t know what you are. This isn’t how a captain acts - you’ve divided, but left yourself no path to conquer. What is your plan, Solus?”

“Solus,” Selene whispered urgently, eyes flickering from threat to threat.

“Solus!” Jason shouted desperately, while Lefteris seethed and thrashed out of his grip.

“Solus.” Scythas took another step forward.

Manifesting intent was a process that required practice, familiarity, and unshakable focus. I was not my brother, and I was only just now beginning to understand how horribly I had neglected the finer details of my refinement, but I was as focused as I had ever been. I cast out my pneuma, shaping my vital essence to a purpose that I was well familiar with.

My spear intent was a sloppy thing at best, without question a junior philosopher’s first effort, and I watched the bewilderment bloom in their eyes as their senses told them the truth of that. Regardless, it was enough. The spear of my intent manifested in the air just in front of the Hero of the Scything Squall and cut a jagged line through the street.

Scythas stared down at the line, then back up to me. The rest of the five watched intensely. My heart thundered, drowning out all else but this moment. These people.

“No further,” I declared, and Scythas flinched like I had slapped him. “If any of you cross this line, consider your ties to me severed.”

“What?” Scythas asked quietly. I swallowed back my bile.

“The Scarlet Oracle is dead,” I told them, and watched horrified understanding break like the dawn in their eyes. “I had plans for all of this, and for all of you, but none of them matter now.”

“Whose blood is that?” Elissa abruptly asked, leveling her sword at Griffon’s blood-stained hands. When he failed to acknowledge her, the Heroine’s pneuma spiked. “Answer me!”

“It wasn’t his fault.” Selene’s voice wavered, but somehow she held steady above her grief. She stared down the Sword Song resolutely. “My mother took her own life. I swear it on my soul.”

For a moment, the scarred Heroine was lost for words. Her eyes cut into me. “What have you done to this girl?”

“What have you done to us?” Kyno asked.

Anastasia’s head tilted, like she was looking at something incomprehensible. “Who are you, really?”

“What do your tyrants say?” I asked her. Each of them was inundated with the smoke stench of their elder’s influence, and not for the first time I cursed myself for leaving them behind in the storm.

“They say you’re fakers,” Elissa spat.

“Murderers,” Lefteris seethed.

“Sophists.” Kyno’s answer was delivered with the least heat, but it discomforted them all the most. They watched me expectantly, one and all. Even Lefteris held his breath, waiting for me to deny it.

I didn’t.

“Even now!?” Scythas exploded, advancing forward with his fists clenched. “People are dying, Solus! The world is falling down around your ears and you’re still pretending-?”

Gravitas.

The captain’s virtue struck the Hero center mass, sending him skidding back across the line. It didn’t move him much further than that, less than ten paces. I braced myself for the retaliation of the fifth legion. It didn’t come.

I’d found it. Too little too late, but I had found an answer nonetheless.

“… it’s enough.” Scythas hadn’t even been knocked over by my attack, let alone injured, yet his body began to tremble. “Just stop it already.”

“Who are you still trying to fool!?” Jason cried out, lurching to the edge of the dais. “Haven’t we proven ourselves yet? Is this not the moment you’ve been waiting for all this time?”

Olympia was coming apart at its every seam - if the Tyrants kept on as they were, the sanctuary city would be a smoking ruin long before the next dawn broke. Would-be champions were fleeing the conflict in droves, picking off rivals and looting from the dead and dying on their way out of the city. Those left behind in the stadium were trapped in their own bloody crucible, ripping their fellow athletes apart and basking in the victory glow of tribulation lightning - gladiators laying their lives on the line for a crowd of empty seats. An era was ending.

Is this not the moment?

Somehow, it was.

“Last year I was a slave,” I said. Jason shook his head, denying the thought entirely, and the rest weren’t far behind him. I didn’t wait for them to put words to it. “The year before that I was a Legate in command of three thousand men - but not because I had earned it. I was only seventeen years old when I was given that distinction. I’m only twenty years old today.”

“Stop it!” Jason shouted. “Just-!”

“Anastasia knows.”

The Heroine of the Blind Maiden Cult had known from the beginning. A physician only needed a brief moment of contact to read their patient’s body like a book. From the moment her fingers had brushed across my shoulder in that shadowed alley, Anastasia had known the truth of my age.

Expectation shifted briefly onto the Caustic Queen, imploring her to deny me. Instead, she struck to the heart of it all.

“Age is not a prerequisite for advancement,” she said accusingly. “There have been younger Heroes than you. There have even been younger Tyrants.”

It was my fault. I had no one but myself to blame for this person they had built up in their heads. Every bold-faced lie, every empty promise, all of the false assumptions and misunderstandings - I had allowed them all to pass without clarification. And for what? Because it suited my needs? Because I had thought the matter settled already? Because I was tired of repeating myself, resigned to being misconstrued by flighty Greeks? Excuses. Pitiful, monstrous excuses.

The truth was that even after everything, a part of me had still wanted to be that man. The captain that Gaius had expected me to be, that the fifth legion had needed me to be. A vile, treacherous portion of my soul had yearned for that second chance. After all, I had nothing left to lose. If I succeeded, I could suffer my punishment in the afterlife with dignity. And if I failed, what did it matter?

[Seek safer shores.]

If only I had known it from the start.

“A Legate is worthless without his legion, and mine was slaughtered to a man.” I stated it plainly. They deserved that much, my bright and shining soldiers. “My foundations as a cultivator are split in two. The half of me that is Roman might as well not be a cultivator at all now. The half of me that is Greek entered the Sophic Realm the day before I was made a slave to Damon Aetos.”

Their pneuma rose precipitously, disbelief and betrayal and rage manifesting each in their own unique way. I forged on ahead, dragging all of it out into the light.

“The day I arrived in this city was the same day that the Rosy Dawn’s Young Aristocrat freed me from my shackles. I am exactly what I appear to be. Half a Legate with no legion, and half a Philosopher on his twelfth step to divinity.”

I forced myself not to look away when the light dimmed in Scythas’ eyes.

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Jason clutched his head, his pneuma pressing in as if to crush himself. “I refuse! I won’t believe it!”

“The Rosy Dawn has a Young Aristocrat,” Elissa spoke, and for the first time since her arrival there was no bite to her voice. She was staring at Griffin. Staring at his clean and mended robes.

“Impossible,” Anastasia said immediately. “The hunting bird’s breath is infamous - I would have recognized the Aetos’ mark on him immediately. His channels are shaped for something else entirely.”

“Lio,” Kyno breathed. Lefteris jerked back.

“What!?” the archer demanded. Kyno didn’t respond, staring at the kneeling Sophist in sudden understanding

“Not a lion, nor an eagle.”

A Griffon.

“No,” Anastasia denied it twice, her funeral veil smoking as its edges burned. She slashed at the air with a flat hand, casting the notion aside. “What sort of heir would lack something so fundamental? What kind of father would allow it?”

“What does your Tyrant say?” I asked her again.

“What does it matter?” Scythas asked quietly. “They’re all liars.” I inclined my head, acknowledging the point.

“The things that you’ve said,” the fair Hero from the Hurricane Heights continued, the wind rising slowly as he spoke, “the actions that you’ve taken- those aren’t- they couldn’t have been-“

He struggled for the words. I didn’t know if it was a cruelty or a kindness, but I supplied them in his stead.

“They couldn’t have been the actions of someone so weak?” I asked. Scythas gnashed his teeth, and I buried the dagger deeper. I would drag all of it, all of it, out into the light. “And if they were? What would that make us?”

“Mad.”

Anastasia’s bleak answer was the end of it.

“No,” Jason groaned. “No, no, no.”

If not their Tyrants or their hearts, who else was left that could convince them?

I stood tall.

“What do your Muses say?”

Glory and Heroic heat exploded from their every pore, five Heroic souls rousing fully awake. Somehow, even after the Butcher’s display and the horror of eight Tyrants clashing, it still shocked me to my core. This was the distance between a mortal and divinity. This was the gap.

How had I ever thought I could stand up to this alone?

“She says that you’re cowards,” spoke Elissa, condemning.

“She says that you’ll drown in the Styx,” spoke Lefteris, hating.

“She says that you’ve reached beyond your station,” spoke Kyno, lamenting.

“She says that you’re getting stronger,” spoke Anastasia, dreading.

“She says I must defeat you,” Scythas spoke, despairing. “She says this is my only chance.”

What else was there to say?

They attacked together, all of them but Jason, and I lost before the battle had even begun. Understanding meant nothing in the face of overwhelming strength. It didn’t matter that I could see their pneuma in motion. It made no difference that my body was stronger and faster than it had ever been. They were Heroes and I was not. The rules of nature bent and broke around them, and those same rules bound my soul in iron shackles.

Selene was an instant too slow. It wasn’t her fault. This wasn’t the world that she had been raised to live in. If not for my hubris, she wouldn’t have been here at all.

Griffon was somewhere else, dead to it all. He hadn’t blinked once since his sash had come apart. There was no fight left in his soul.

I was reaching, grasping for something that had never been within my reach in the first place. My pneumatic sense showed me what my eyes were too dull to catch.

Elissa and Kyno were there as if the space between us had never existed to begin with, the Sword Song’s bronze blade thrusting for Griffon’s heart while the Huntsman drove a wicked skinning knife towards his eye. Behind them, Lefteris had drawn back his bow’s gold string to the limits of its frame, aiming a blazing arrow at my brother’s throat.

And there was Anastasia by my side, her healing hands moving towards a swift and merciful execution - two burning fingers moving to drive straight through my temple. Scythas’ blade was already biting into my neck. Jason was there between them, reaching out to stop them both, but it wasn’t quite enough.

You lose.

You’ve lost.

This one’s your loss again!

It’s enough.

You think so too, don’t you?

At least you can tell them that you tried.

Rest easy.

The battle was lost before you were born-

No.

The space between their actions and my reaction was less than a second - an eternity too long. The space between their actions and our deaths was slim enough it could have been mistaken for no space at all. There was no time for any mortal creature to act. No time for even a hummingbird's heart to beat.

I refuse.

My heart beat once.

What-!

The golden lifeblood of the Titan Flame was a force of unstoppable refinement. It could be put towards almost any cultivator’s purpose, so long as the path forward was made clear and so long as it was given time to circulate throughout the body. That I had been forced to put its refinement of my pneumatic sense on hold wasn’t an indictment of the ichor. The diminishing returns I had to run up against were a failing of mine.

Fool that I was, I hadn’t realized until it was all but too late that the only thing limiting Prometheus’ golden ichor was my heart’s ability to pump it through my body. I should have been focusing all of its efforts on my heart from the start. I had realized that, finally, and then Scythas had stopped us in our tracks and I had run out of time. I’d had no choice but to make my own time while the ichor did its frantic work. I’d had no choice but to hope it was enough.

My heart beat twice. The flames behind their eyes flickered.

It’s not enough.

I don’t care.

You’re not enough.

It doesn’t matter.

You’ll never be enough.

I know.

The more you try, the more you’ll bring to ruin.

And yet.

The world would flourish in your passing.

Even so.

Why? So that you can live to die more hated tomorrow? What will you do when victory is no longer even a concept your mind can comprehend? What will you do when you run out of games to lose?

[What will you do when Raging Heaven strikes you down?]

What other answer could there be?

[I’LL RISE.]

My pneuma doubled and redoubled, driven to advancement by the appearance of a higher ideal. I ascended from the second rank of the Sophic realm to the third. A laughable improvement compared to what I faced. It was little more than a shower of sparks against five roaring flames.

Those sparks flew. My heart beat a third and final time before I died.

!!!!!!!!

Prometheus’ golden ichor went up in flames.

Six Heroic cultivators drew back in terror and disbelief as golden heat erupted from my eyes, and I clenched my grasping hand into a fist.

Beginning with our race down from the storm crown and ending with the drawing of a line, I had used my newfound awareness to scour the depths of my soul for a solution to the impairment imposed upon my virtue in Thracia. I had felt the first hint of its source when I invoked the captain’s virtue to anchor Griffon and I through the death throes of six heroes - there was a schism in my soul, a schism that Socrates had explained to me months ago in the late kyrios’ estate, and only half of it had raged at my usage of it. Only the Roman half of my foundation had penalized me for my presumption.

I had sought control over my split foundation while we fled the rioting Tyrants, flexing through trial and error two separate muscles that I had spent my whole life believing were one. Once I had learned the trick of moving one half without the other, it was only a question of subordination. The Roman captain’s virtue was found in the guidance of subordinate souls. So long as they were the soldiers to my captain, I could never leverage my virtue against our Heroic companions without invoking the Fifth’s wrath.

So I’d drawn a line in the sand. A line dividing the Roman from the Greek.

And they’d crossed it.

“Gravitas,” I intoned.

The Greek half of my virtue was pitiful in comparison to the Roman, hardly strong enough to knock Scythas back ten paces. If the Roman half of my virtue was the strength of those I did not deserve to lead, the Greek half was my own power. The strength to carry thirty men, if only just. It wasn’t nearly strong enough for this fight.

But that could change.

I took the golden flame in hand, burnt away my heart’s blood, and spent all that time on this moment.

The Greek captain’s virtue took hold of six Heroic cultivators and flung them up to heaven - along with the entirety of the great city’s agora. Blocks upon blocks of city streets rose up, all of their blasted out homes, their uprooted trees, and the molten slag left behind by the rein-holder’s whip. It all came away from the earth as if suddenly untethered. As if the axis of creation had shifted for them alone, and they were falling.

Jason, Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, Anastasia, and Scythas fell up along with the wreckage, bonelessly at first, but then twisting and writhing in a helpless effort to escape their ascent.

Without looking back, I pointed down at my own shadow and the grasping hands reaching up from it.

“At ease,” I said firmly. Gravitas crushed them flat against my silhouette.

The fire burned and burned.

I stepped past Griffon and slammed my spear through the theater mask as I went. The force shattered it like it was made ceramic instead of wood, and Griffon lurched in place.

“Wretched brother of my blood. Your origins are hopelessly grim,” I told him. “But this life is yours to decide. If your story ends as it began, it’ll be because you chose it.”

I kept on marching, burning as I went. Far, far above, Scythas twisted and stared down at the city of Olympia in flat incomprehension. Then his eyes flickered, moving frenetically as they traced a path only he could see.

The Hero of the Scything Squall whistled a shrill note and shot back down to earth like he’d been fired from a ballista. The wind gave him his current, and his muse provided him a path down through the rising wreckage.

The whirlwind carried him past me and behind, to strike me in my blindspot. I glanced back over my shoulder. Our eyes met.

Selene lunged between us and stabbed her ceremonial spear through his chest. He hung there in weightless shock - his feet still hadn’t touched the ground.

The Oracle’s daughter flooded pneuma through her spear, and Scythas’ expression went slack as her oracular technique took hold. Then Selene pivoted, spinning on her heel to build momentum and throwing him off her spear with a shout of effort. The Hero’s limp body hurtled into the distant western districts and vanished through the smoke.

Five stars burned brighter than the rest in the skies above our heads as the rest of our opposition called upon their foundational techniques. Even now, their glory far outshone me.

“I’m with you, Solus,” Selene promised, stepping up beside me and glaring resolutely at the stars.

It would have to be enough.

I reached out, grasping at the distant Heroes and the displaced agora and closing my fist around them. I burned and burned, feeding borrowed power into the captain’s virtue. I dragged my arm sideways and swung it down, pointing west towards the distant Ionian.

A sound like mountains breaking and oceans boiling to mist heralded the shifting of axis, everything in the grip of my virtue ceasing to fall up and instead falling sideways. It was enough to gutter out the techniques the Heroes had been bringing to bear, but only just. Already they were fighting through it to close the distance by various means.

“What next, cultivator?” The Scarlet Oracle asked me.

“We fight.” I kept marching on, striding forward to meet them.

“And if we lose?”

“We rise. We fight again.”

Until the heavens fell.

1.132

The Son of Rome

The first instant nearly killed us.

Polyzalus was the Rein-Holder, and he had proven that epithet well-earned when Dymas confronted him. Unspoken, yet plainly implied, was the fact that a charioteer only needed one hand to hold his reins. The other hand carried his whip.

Stripped of half his dominion and challenged in his own throne of power, the Tyrant still moved faster than any of his peers. I didn’t need to look back to feel the dread heat of his rising hatred. I could feel it on my back and in my tripartite soul, a burning brand that marked us all for death.

I called upon Gravitas for the second time that day, slapping us out of the sky as the Rein-Holder’s first whip cracked. I heard Selene gasp behind us as the captain’s virtue knocked the wind out of her. For her, that was the extent of it. For Griffon and I, my virtue flung us at a diagonal as it had Selene, and then it slammed us straight down as the Fifth’s displeasure made itself known.

The burning whip struck the city of Olympia and cut deep, drawing a molten line through the city that carried on into the horizon further than my eyes could see. The proximity heat and the blow back alone would have turned our bones to shrapnel and pulped our insides if not for our refinement. I knew immediately that we were not the only ones marked by its passing. How many had been fragile citizens? How many hadn’t been cultivators at all?

In less than a second, the First Son to Burn had killed hundreds of Olympia’s denizens. Perhaps thousands. All for a parting shot that he hadn’t even made the effort to properly aim. The reason for that was obvious enough - we survived that first strike only because he was already turning from us as he cast it out. The rest of his focus and his strength had been reserved for his peers.

Griffon and I plummeted straight down into the outskirts of Olympia, Selene soared over our heads, and the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult attacked as one.

Or at least, attacked at the same time.

I had spoken to four Tyrants in their mountain kingdoms during my stint as the Raven. From those encounters, and from my subsequent visits, I had gleaned the surface level implications of their power. Surprisingly enough, those direct encounters hadn’t been the only opportunities I’d had to gather information on them. Day in and day out, I had been hounded by lesser initiates of the Raging Heaven Cult’s various factions, and I had discovered something that I should have known already from my time in the legions.

Whether it was a commanding officer or an ancient king, subordinates loved to gossip. They bragged to me about their own elders, seeking to gain my favor on their behalf, and they disparaged the elders of every other faction towards that same end. They talked and talked and kept on talking, as was the way of Greeks - and patricians, if I was being honest with myself. Similarly, most of their words amounted to nothing in the end. But not all.

Each of the eight Tyrants acted faster than I could ever hope to track, levying techniques whose origins were as incomprehensible to me as the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. Despite that, when things went awry at the moment of their joining, I had some idea as to why.

Their own words and simple common sense would have led anyone to believe the first strike would be seven against one. In reality, the alliance broke down the moment it was formed.

Drakon of the Broken Tide was a monstrous man, ancient even by the standards of his peers, and the members of the Broken Tide Cult had boasted more than once that Tyrants cultivated in pursuit of standards that he had set over half a millennia ago. The man known to his citizens as both Judge and Jury had sworn to me on the River Styx that he would stand against Polyzalus, if and when the time came. His first act just barely stayed true to that vow.

The grim lawmaker immediately sought to expand his domain, casting out a framework of imposed rule that echoed Socrates’ gossamer web of rhetoric, but writ far larger. The act threatened Polyzalus, to be sure, but it threatened the other six just as much. Everything caught inside his framework suffered a portion of what every citizen suffered within a Tyrant’s domain - the loss of their own soul’s agency.

Somehow, by means I still didn’t understand, Drakon could do this without challenging another Tyrant’s domain directly. He could bind them without fear of retribution, because for some reason they had no voice in the discussion. It was obvious enough why any Tyrant would be named Judge, but this ability was why the Broken Tide’s elder was called the Jury.

I hadn’t received an offer to enter the domain of the Brazen Aegis’ elder, but I had heard enough to understand why Solon pivoted before the first whip had cracked and locked horns with the Coast’s old Judge and Jury. The specifics of their clash were entirely lost on me - you lack context - but the effect was clear enough. Drakon’s framework lurched in place, ebbing and flowing like the tides, but never quite managing to fully encompass the mountain.

Midas and Ptolemy moved in accordance to their word, and each of them warped the world around them in their passing. The king of Alabaster Isles turned everything he touched to gold, including the dread essence of his rivals. Polyzalus met him with dozens of the same whips that had carved a trench in the world from horizon-to-horizon, and each of them turned to molten gold as they struck the king, melting to his skin in accordance with his will and forming armor that thrummed with Polyzalus’ stolen strength.

Ptolemy’s domain was something I still couldn’t intuitively grasp. Ptolemy the Savior was a Macedonian born and raised, and had ruled in Egypt when the Conqueror cast him off. He was as foreign to the Greeks as the Greeks were to me, and so all that I could understand of the glimpse my senses gave me was the fact that his hollow domain consumed everything it touched. Polyzalus cast hundreds of whips into his face, and in their hundreds they vanished without a trace.

Had that been the extent of it, the clash may have been decided then and there. Unfortunately, the moment the two kings had turned their backs, the king of the Spartans and the queen of the Amazons attacked their supposed allies without hesitation.

The Savior’s hollow domain unmade the Spartan king’s spear the moment it touched his skin, but Leonidas of Infernal Frenzies only roared and willed three hundred rust-bitten spears into that same empty space. Ptolemy’s bizarre domain ate those too, but it couldn’t get through them all before Leonidas ran him through.

Simultaneously, Thalestris of the Blind Maiden Cult loomed large in her domain and levied a bow the size of a ship at Midas’ back. She closed her eyes as she drew its colossal string back, and from her living flesh a near perfect copy of the queen rose, shining silver-bright and carrying a bow of her own. The copy aimed an arrow of pure onyx straight up.

Both visions of the Amazon queen loosed their arrows simultaneously. One struck Midas in the back and erupted as a golden arrowhead out through his chest. The other flew with no apparent target into the skies above.

The silver-bright queen’s arrow found its mark and the setting sun vanished, plunging the city of Olympia into starry night.

Distracted by treachery and forced aside, the task of Polyzalus’ execution fell to the first bitter king to join my alliance. The king of seers leapt entirely from his domain and dropped a screaming hurricane on Polyzalus’ head. Alone thought he was against the First Son to Burn, it still would have ended there. Selene’s father was weakened, his attention had been split between his enemies, and Aleuas Pyrrhos struck him with the full might of his concentrated rage at my betrayal and his hatred for his rivals. It was enough, just barely.

“Why?”

Or it would have been, had the Gadfly not tripped him up.

I crashed through the sloped stone roof of an art house, and the rest of the opening exchange was lost to me while I tumbled.

I tore myself free of a weaver's half-made tapestry while shockwaves rocked Kaukoso Mons above, casting around for Griffon and finding him in a similar state of entanglement. I ripped away threads that he could have burnt to ashes with casual effort, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him roughly.

“Griffon. Griffon! You have to move.” If he heard me at all, I couldn’t see it in his eyes. They were glassy and unfocused. He stared at his bloody hands and the knife they were holding like they belonged to someone else entirely. I slapped him hard across the cheek and it did nothing but make his right ear bleed.

Seconds after our landing, Selene descended a stone’s throw further down the street. She was calling out for us as she fell, desperate and at her limit in more ways than one. I caught her in the middle of my stride, tucking her under my left arm while she choked and caught her breath.

I spoke before she could demand an answer I didn’t have to give her. Where are we going? What are we going to do? How can this be salvaged? There was nothing I could say to those.

No answers, and not a single moment to find one.

“Take him,” I told her. She reeled, and I cursed every second lost while she gathered herself.

“Take-?” Her eyes flickered, and her expression twisted when she caught sight of Griffon on my other side. Given hours and Orpheus’ own guidance, I couldn’t have identified half the emotions in her heart then, let alone untangled them from one another.

“Why?” She finally asked after entirely too long. “Did he break something?”

“He’s in shock.” The arm that Selene was not tucked under held Griffon up as best as I could while running at full speed through an erupting warzone. I wasn’t dragging his full weight, but I wasn’t far from it either. His legs worked listlessly, moving on pure physical instinct and stumbling as often as not.

“Help me,” I entreated the daughter of the late Scarlet Oracle - the girl whose mother I had just helped take away. The taste of bile and the Fifth’s phantom scorn momentarily overwhelmed the oppressive smoke in the air. I forced it back down into its depths. “Please.”

Selene’s heart flames flickered between Griffon and I, steam from vaporized tears trailing in her wake. She clenched her eyes shut, shuttering the light, and inhaled a trembling breath. What came over her then was as profound as any oracle’s majesty. For a girl of only sixteen years, maybe more so.

“Very well,” she whispered. Her eyes opened, and her scarlet glare burned with her heart’s resolve.

I heaved both of them forward as hard as I could. Selene twisted with a dancer’s grace and slipped underneath Griffon’s arm, slinging it across her shoulders like a yoke and steadying him with one hand on his wrist and the other around his waist. When their feet touched the road she took off without missing a beat, carrying forward the momentum of my toss into a swift run.

Thus unburdened, I surged past them and pulled my celestial spear from my shadow. There was no time to convey my gratitude properly. No time to do anything at all but seek safer shores.

“Follow me,” I told her, Prometheus’ golden ichor pounding a steady drum beat against my channels. “I’ll clear a path forward.”

Some things were easier said than done. Others couldn’t be done at all. I gripped my bronze armament tight and forced that thought aside. I had no room for it.

The Sanctuary City of Olympia had been battered and bruised the night Griffon and I fled the Rosy Dawn, wounded on the surface and also deep within its heart by the passing of the Tyrant Riot. Mastercraft architects and the tireless efforts of thousands had mended the surface level damage in the months that followed, rebuilding homes and repairing broken roads at close to a legion’s pace. Unfortunately, their restoration had only ever been skin deep. The rot within the heart had been left to fester and spread, more disastrous by far, and now it unmade all their efforts.

We fled as fast as we could, but it wasn’t nearly fast enough to outpace the cataclysm of eight Tyrants clashing. Towering architectural monuments flew apart like they’d been struck by a giant’s hammer, man-made rivers and fountain pools boiled over like neglected cooking pots, and the very earth heaved and lurched like some horrible serpent was writhing just underneath the city. Every construct of flesh and blood that wasn’t already a corpse screamed and begged for salvation not forthcoming - men, women, children, and even the livestock and pets. None were spared.

I struck the flying shrapnel from the air with my spear and rushed through heaving streets like a sailor lost at sea. All the while, my mind raced out ahead of me.

Each option was bleaker than the one that came before it. Turn back, fight to topple them all, and die. Turn back, fight to preserve my alliance, and die. Turn back to save Socrates. Turn back to save our companions. Turn back to save the innocents on the mountain. Fight. Die.

With the setting sun shot out of the sky, and the city’s hearths scattered or buried beneath the rubble of blasted out homes, the greatest sources of light besides the stars were the echoes of warring Tyrants. Lights of myriad color and intensity flared behind us without end, byproducts of elders sinking fang and claw into one another with an intensity not meant for mortal frames. The molten scar left behind by Polyzalus’ first whip crack glowed a sullen blood-orange, throwing off light and sulfurous heat while it grew steadily wider, steadily consuming everything in its close proximity. The last and greatest source of light, of course, came from the Heroes.

I heard Selene gasp behind me as lightning briefly lit up the night sky. It fell without warning, thunder, or passing clouds, descending not from the mountain’s storm crown but from the clear skies over the Olympic stadium. Lights like hundreds of blazing torches shone through the gaps in the spiraling tiers of statue columns that made up the Olympic Stadium’s outer walls. Those lights were soon joined by the physical sensation of glory and the rising volume of a heavenly chorus.

Lightning struck again, three times in quick succession. Then, only moments later, five more times in a tighter grouping. The light reached higher with every bleak bolt, and each time the heavenly chorus gained more voices. Heroic cultivators that had gathered in the hundreds to compete for the title of Champion ascended one by one in response to the madness, and for a moment I felt hope.

But only for a moment. The Olympic stadium loomed large ahead of us, growing larger as we sprinted towards it. The closer we got the more confused I became. The lightning didn’t lie, and neither did the chorus - the athletes in the stadium were advancing, just as the Butcher had advanced. Yet I saw no Heroes flinging themselves up to Kaukoso Mons in opposition to cruel reality. Through the gaps in the stadium walls, I only saw…

Each other? Selene mouthed in silent disbelief as I pivoted on my heel and sprinted away from the stadium.

I hadn’t seen any Heroes leaving the stadium because I had been looking up. There were plenty leaving, sure enough, but they weren’t taking the fight to the Tyrants above. They spilled out of the stadium like bees from a kicked hive, powerful pneuma radiating from their souls as they took off in every direction. Some rode on the backs of virtuous beasts, some tapped into movement techniques or camouflage and vanished from my senses, and more still simply ran at breakneck speed. As they left, lightning continued to strike inside of the stadium.

For reasons that I suspected but hoped I was wrong about, the chain-breakers and monster-slayers remaining in the Olympic Stadium had turned on one another. They were tearing each other apart, and the victors were advancing in their multitudes - only to then be torn down by the next competitor in line.

Some of the cultivators running away may have been taking the fight to the Tyrants on Kaukoso Mons. Some of the cultivators fighting in the pit may have stayed behind to protect their peers from the predation of would-be gladiators. I didn’t wait to find out.

Turn back to the mountain, fight, and die. Carry on to the stadium, fight, and die. Flee east, flee north, flee south. Fight. Fight. Fight.

Die.

Die.

“Die a captain’s death!”

There was no path forward. My mind raced in search of something, anything that could light our way, but all it found was salt and ash. In place of paths forward, I found a thousand-thousand golden roads fanning out behind me.

Every hollowed out home, every crumpled up corpse, every shining light of a Hero’s misused glory - each of them was a path I could have taken. Each miserable tragedy and all of the city’s most contemptible cowards were elements that I could have taken into account. They were strengths that I could have made my own, or weaknesses that I could have cut away before the final hour. My treacherous mind seized upon everything I saw and thought back instead of forward, building brick by golden brick a thousand-thousand ways that I could have done this right. Paths that a greater man - Caesar - would have marched down without hesitation, paths that a wiser man - Aristotle - would have navigated around to avert this calamity entirely. It did me no good at all. All of it useless, wasted effort.

A grand stoa buckled just up ahead, like an overburdened spine, and caved in on itself entirely as another Tyrant’s strike rocked the earth beneath us. The stone statuary decorating its roof tumbled and fell away like so many stone soldiers. One of them, a man in hoplite armor with a helmet but no face, was in pieces before it hit the ground. The rod it had been holding spun through the air and sank tip-first into the garden lawn surrounding the building.

I blinked and stared through smoke and miasma heat at the standard perched proudly atop it. The iron eagle’s wings were spread wide, as if it was about to take flight. Its head was turned to the side, its talons curled tight around a laurel wreath. The eagle standard of Rome stared balefully back at me while the city fell to ruin all around it. While my city fell. While Rome…

I ripped the rod out of the dirt as I passed it by, smashing it against the fractured steps leading up to the stoa. The standard at the end of the rod, not an eagle forged from iron but a raven chiseled from marble, shattered to pieces.

I scoured my mind clean. There was no path forward, fine. What then?

Turn back. Fight. Die-

I took the second impulse in hand, tracing its startling intensity back to the source. Of course I wanted to turn back. Of course I wanted to atone. But both of those impulses were easily overruled by my duty to Rome’s lost legions. Why, then, when I knew I couldn’t turn back and die, was I still itching for the fight?

I found the answer and the way forward both in the same place, deep within. Pushed to the back of my awareness this entire time while I focused on more important things, Prometheus’ ichor hadn’t dwindled away. It hadn’t even stagnated. Not content to sit idly by, it had grown, cycling through my body alongside my blood and filling every spoke of the wheel carved into my body by starlight marrow and Orphic rites. It had grown hotter, and it hadn’t stopped. Now that I gave it my full attention, I felt it calling out for blood.

Fight. Fight. FIGHT.

I knew what was waiting for me on Kaukoso Mons. I knew that I couldn’t turn back now, I knew that I couldn’t afford to die today, and it didn’t matter. I wanted to turn back anyway, to fight anyway - because despite everything I had seen, I knew that I could win. Reason told me otherwise. It didn’t matter. My gut, the animal instinct that informed every creature, told me I was prey to the predators warring on the mountain. It didn’t matter. Lived experience and the words of every mentor I’d ever had told me I would surely die if I turned back now, and it did not matter.

I could fight. I could win.

If I could live through this, I could do anything.

I crushed that voice to death and banished it from my mind. A veil I hadn’t noticed until it was too obvious to miss, like stage curtains catching flame, was lifted from my thoughts. I formed a shield wall at once around my senses and turned my focus inward as the Titan’s golden lifeblood pounded at the barrier.

In the distance far behind us, the despoiled queen of the Amazons shouted a word of wrath and dread power, followed by a sound that I imagined a loosed bow string might have made if it was composed of metal cords and drawn back by a giant. The Gadfly’s gossamer web of whisper-thin rhetoric bulged, the Rein-Holder cracked his ten thousand whips, and the attack was deflected. The arrow implied by the noise struck the eastern market district closest to Olympia’s agora and exploded.

Selene’s alarmed cry and the sensation of being flung off my feet by the shockwave were distant things. My body rolled and surged back into a sprint without pause, while my mind focused on the immediate threat.

Golden ichor raged inside my body, so hot now that my breath steamed like I was back in Thracia’s winter countryside rather than a burning city. It clawed at the shield wall I had formed around my sanity, and when it couldn’t get through the soldiers it shouted over their heads. It promised me I could win. It promised me I could do anything, so long as I committed everything to the act.

It told me I was invincible.

“Even their gifts are a pox upon your souls.”

The Thief of Flame was humanity’s oldest and most stalwart defender. Even so, he was a Titan. His actions didn’t make him less of what he was - only more. Traitor or not, he remained an agent of the heavens.

“Heaven is cruel even to those that it wishes well.”

He had warned us.

I couldn’t afford to be this ignorant. All the gold in Egypt’s coffers wouldn’t be enough to afford me such a luxury. I lacked context for everything that mattered, and I’d let another city burn because of it. Rome was already a debt I could have worked a thousand lifetimes and never been able to repay. Olympia would bury me.

“It ends,” I growled, echoed by three thousand.

I took the Titan’s ichor in hand again, holding it tight when it tried to overtake me, and ordered it to go elsewhere. It did more than acquiesce. It leapt to my command, obeying me like an eager hound, and thus revealed the first and most obvious of its qualities.

It wasn’t that it wanted to subvert me - in fact, it wanted to serve my purposes, to meld itself to the shape of my will as Prometheus’ influence had when he’d rebalanced us. The issue lay with me. Something I had done, or more likely something I had not done. The golden ichor had been left to its own devices while Griffon and I raced down the mountain to deliver our nectar, and it had taken steps to rectify that.

The finer mechanisms of cultivation had always been a secondary concern to me, even from a young age. As an arrogant young patrician, later as a boy playing soldier in the legion camps, and finally as a captain of the Fifth - I had always been of the mind that strength would follow if I simply acted as I should. Even after the destruction of my world, as a foreigner in a land full of Greek oddities, I had fallen back into that state of mind without conscious thought.

I’d been reassured I had the right of it by the apparent frivolities of Greek ascension, the neverending confluence of rise and fall based entirely upon aesthetic and heaven’s whimsy. My half-hearted lessons with the Gadfly hadn’t been enough to outweigh that, not even close. Then, in Thracia, I’d had my way of thinking confirmed by divinity itself.

“Live your life, brother. That’s all any of us have to do.”

Would that I had remembered I was talking to a corpse.

I bid the ichor to show me what it had done to my body, and it presented its work with relish. I left no stone unturned and nothing implied. I sifted through the muck in search of golden insight, noting every change along the way.

All of my senses had been sharpened, up to and including the perceptions of a Civic and Sophic cultivator. The distance at which I could discern a third rank Philosopher from a fourth rank Philosopher had more than tripled. Even now I could feel its range expanding. As I was at this moment, I might have even been able to perceive the Heroic cultivators that had been watching Griffon and I from afar while we raced down the mountain. Maybe.

I looked to my right, focusing on a distant tree burning wanly as the Rein-Holder’s molten scar rolled over its roots. It was far enough away that I could only just make out the tree’s individual branches. I counted the seconds as I ran parallel to it. One. Two. Three.

My vision sharpened incrementally with every beat of my heart. Each beat took in gold ichor, refined it, and circulated it through my body hotter and brighter than before. After seven seconds, I could count every curling leaf on that distant burning tree. Five seconds after that, I could count the veins in one of its leaves as it fell.

I felt sturdier, less liable to buckle beneath the weight heaped upon my shoulders. That was as far as I had taken the observation before. Now I dove deeper. I observed the contraction of my muscles and the strength of their fibers as I sprinted and struck out with my spear to clear the way. My load-bearing strength had increased to the point where my every waking motion no longer felt like I had someone at the other end applying twice my force against me. As the seconds passed, I was starting to feel light.

There was more to it than that, I realized. My slow, enduring strength had risen, but so too had my snap reactions. I had missed it before, attributing the sharper reflexes to the comparatively lighter load I was carrying, but the difference was four fold. I had just regained my prior agility from before our trip to Thracia. I had outstripped it entirely while maintaining the new burden of my weight. When I threw a punch, it hit four times harder than it would have yesterday. If this growth continued, it wouldn’t be long before I could throw a punch another four times stronger than that.

From the pallor of my skin to the rigidity of the nails on my fingers and toes, I took nothing for granted. I brought all of it to the forefront of my awareness, then went a step further and separated out the improvements that had come from the titan’s direct rebalancing. Only then, once I had assembled the full mosaic, did I act upon it.

I called upon the ichor, all of the ichor, and it rushed to fulfill my desire. Peripherally, I watched all the portions of my body and soul affected by the Titan’s lifeblood suddenly stagnate in their growth. All of them stopped and settled into equilibrium except for the one that I had funneled the ichor entirely towards.

My heart beat once. My cultivator sense exploded outward, doubling its range instantaneously. My heart beat twice. The range of my perception grew by the same amount again - no, it should have, but for some reason… No, it had. I tracked a cultivator tunneling deep beneath the earth and away from the Raging Heaven Cult, someone that I hadn’t been able to sense a heartbeat prior. It wasn’t that the range had increased by a smaller margin. My cultivator sense wasn’t a circle on a flat plane. It was a sphere.

I fed the entirety of the ichor’s refining efforts into my ability to sense pneuma, and it grew at an unbelievable pace until the sphere of my pneumatic sense had all but encompassed the Half-Step City. I swept my awareness up and down the ruined streets, bypassing rubble and flame to find those still living in the wreckage. My eyes narrowed, and the golden ichor boiled in response to my dissatisfaction.

The sixth sense that a cultivator had for pneuma was something they refined over time. A first rank Citizen, for example, might be able to enter a room and know there was another cultivator in it but little else. If they got closer and the other cultivator was the same rank, they’d likely be able to tell. They might even be able to guess the difference if the other cultivator was a couple steps above them. Beyond that, it would become a worthless blur of more. As a second rank Philosopher, I could identify the relative strength of any cultivator within my range down to the exact rank so long as they were in my realm or below. Past the tenth rank of the Sophic realm, all I could tell was that they were beyond me.

I cut the flow from my pneumatic sense. It was reaching its practical limits regardless - the rate of its growth hadn’t faltered once, but that did precious little for me when the sphere’s lateral growth had been reduced to finger lengths.

I felt a vibrant star of pneuma diverge from its path and move to intercept us. Too high above me on the ladder to tell by how much. It could have been a freshly risen Hero. It could have been a captain of the Heroic realm. For all I knew, it could have even been a Tyrant.

I raised my celestial spare like a javelin and hurled it with all my might. It vanished through clouds of smoke, but I felt the reaction to its impact. The starbright presence stopped short, sliding back about the length of a city block, and then it turned away and fled northeast. Weak enough to balk at my bluff, then.

It wasn’t good enough. It was still far and away too crude. I flooded my pneumatic sense with the ichor’s golden refinement again. My heart beat once. I drew the ichor back. Wrong. I urged it forward again. My heart beat twice. Wrong. The golden life blood writhed in my channels. I cast it forward again. My heart beat thrice.

“Wrong,” I snarled. The golden ichor boiled furiously. It lurched for control of me again, the message clear - if I couldn’t provide it with a purpose, it would act on my behalf. I wrestled it down, thinking back through countless boyhood lectures. I was focused on the correct thing, but not the correct aspect.

I needed to isolate one portion of a cultivator’s sight from the others, to guide it with direct purpose, having spent the entirety of my life prior to this point allowing instinct to guide me in its use. It was like I was consciously forcing my eyes to adjust for darkness while standing in broad daylight. It felt unnatural. It was what I should have been doing from the very start.

Finally, after long seconds of struggle, I struck gold in the form of an old adage that Aristotle had been forced to teach me more than once.

“Magnitude. Motion. Time. Every natural phenomenon can be measured by these metrics. And with experience, through ingenuity, a man can leverage his understanding of natural law to adjust these aspects in his favor.”

The ichor converged on that memory and savaged it like a starving wolf. We reached an understanding, the ichor and I, and I cast it forward once more.

As was the case for all things, I could split my pneumatic sense three ways. I urged every portion of Prometheus’ essence into my pneumatic sense, but once it was there I diverted it away from magnitude and away from motion, funneling it entirely towards time. It was a guess, but I’d learn something even from failure here.

My heart beat once, and every first rank Hero within my range burst forth from their featureless cloud of more and stood out from the rest in perfect clarity. I dipped down and recovered my spear as I passed it by, tracking the first rank Hero I had deterred with it as well as Selene running close behind me.

I fed that aspect of my perception until it ran up against the same wall of diminishing returns as my range, guttering out just a few steps shy of parsing Heroic souls from Tyrants. I surveyed the bloodbath in the Olympic stadium with new eyes, tracking for myself the progression of the victors in the bare instants before the lightning struck them and made their ascension obvious.

Almost. It was almost good enough. The ichor raced ahead of me now, taking my discontent as a challenge and seeking to fill the gap before I could order it done. This time I allowed it, and the ichor poured its full efforts into the last of the three cups.

Motion.

My heart beat once, and finally, finally, I could see it.

“Gravitas,” I intoned, slamming through stone and earth up to my waist as the captain’s virtue hammered me down. Selene called out to me, seeking answers that I owed her more than anyone, but my focus was split too many ways as it was.

I dragged myself out of the ground and rushed ahead, heart hammering away.

Gravitas.

The same result. I clawed my way out of the earth, and tried again. And again. And again.

Finally, I cast that path aside. My pneumatic sense was a portion of the solution, but it wasn’t enough. The golden ichor reared back as if it had a face and I had just slapped it. It thundered and raged, thrashing for control. Each time I bestowed upon it a purpose, it sprang to oblige me - but it was more abrasive every time I pulled that purpose away.

What was missing? What did I lack that the ichor could give me? It wasn’t an issue of clarity now. I could see it, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t put proof to my intent. What then? Strength? I couldn’t afford the time that it would take to refine that. It wasn’t enough to improve my muscle fibers alone - I needed more durable bones to match. I’d have to split the ichor’s focus, hope it made me strong enough before I ran into the barrier of its diminishing returns. Then I’d have to contend with the greater limitations that followed, like my heart’s ability to pump enough blood for such a physique…

My heart.

I coughed, spitting blood out onto the street.

I was a fool.

My pneumatic sense warned me of approaching ruin. A first rank hero that had been hurtling through the air above the city’s quaking agora with no apparent direction abruptly diverged, surging forward as if it had been waiting for my mind to drift. I planted my feet, kicking up a shower of broken stones and earth. Selene’s pneuma rippled in alarm.

“Stop!”

Gale winds blasted me in the back, seeking to bowl me over mid-stride. Only my instant of forewarning and the weight of thirty worlds kept my feet planted. It caught Selene in midair. She tumbled past me, losing her grip on Griffon and skipping like a stone across the ravaged city center.

Griffon avoided the worst of the fall on reflex alone, hitting the ground in a partial crouch. A jagged piece of broken stone caught the delicate fabric of his golden sash, tearing it open as he fell, and a wood-carved theater mask came tumbling out.

The cypress mask rolled, clattering across the ground and drawing all of Griffon’s absent focus to it. Just before it settled, I saw a single word carved into its inner face.

Liar.

A/N: After some thought, I decided to split this chapter in half for future release. I'm finishing up edits on the second half as I write this, and will be posting it soon. Next new chapter will hopefully be out within the next day or two. 'Til then.

1.131 [Ethos]

A small eternity after the Son of Rome and the Young Griffon come charging out of the immortal storm crown that hangs above Kaukoso Mons, six Heroic souls come tumbling out after them. Four Heroes and two Heroines, each of them marked by the raven’s hand.

All six of them are brimming with vitality and joyous defiance. Through the efforts of one, all six have been given the once in a lifetime opportunity to drink from divinity’s cup. Each of them has suffered terrible injuries, but only one of them has the wounds to show for it. The rest of them emerge from the storm crown healthy and whole, better off than they were when they entered it.

That isn’t to say that each of them drinks their cups equally dry, of course. Of the six Heroes afforded the opportunity, only the Sword Song chooses to drink every drop of nectar she’s given. The nectar cleanses her of everything but her scars.

The Captain of the Depths drinks half a cup in his delirium, and in so doing his sudden blindness is more than just reversed. He looks upon the world with new eyes when he emerges from the storm, seeing more than even a Hero is meant to discern.

The Caustic Queen and the Gold-String Guardian each drink just enough to mend their wounds and carry them through the storm. The Caustic Queen saves the bulk of her panacea brew for her mother - and for a physician’s future research. The Gold-String Guardian saves the bulk of his cup for the boys he’s taken in. It’s less than he wanted for them, but far more than he expected to get. Both the Heroine and the Hero lurch out of the storm in painful shape, but that small sip is enough to swiftly make them whole again.

The Huntsman touches only a drop of nectar to his tongue. His virtuous beast has taken the brunt of the storm’s wrath on his behalf, and the only reason he takes that drop at all is to see if it works. Once confirmed, the Huntsman pours the entirety of his cup into the open maw of his crocodile companion. The Huntsman emerges from the storm looking no worse for wear, despite only barely tasting of the brew. The only visible change is in his crocodile skin cloak - steam pours off of it like morning vapor from a lake.

Finally, the last of the six - and the only one to be offered a cup unprompted - drinks no nectar at all. The Hero of the Scything Squall gives half his cup to the Captain of the Depths, and the rest he holds in reserve. No matter how many wounds he suffers, and no matter how many times his own Muse urges him to take a sip, he never once considers changing his mind. He is ashamed enough that he gave away the majority of the cauldron to his peers, though he knows the Son of Rome would not have wanted them to die just so he could gain.

The Hero Scythas holds half his cup in reserve for Solus. Because of this, he emerges from the storm crown in by far the sorriest state. His hazel heart flames burn brightly, unmarred by heaven’s wrath, but his body is so battered that Jason has to hold him up every few seconds when the lingering lightning damage turns his limbs against him. Despite this, he is happier than he can remember ever being. For the first time in his entire life, Scythas thinks triumph is within his reach.

Then he staggers out of the storm, and the sound of everything unfolding below strikes him like a hammer.

The breeze carries everything to his ear. Everything. The voice of the wind is panicked, and so it does none of its usual filtering to soften the blow for him. Scythas collapses to his knees not because his body is at its limit, although it is, but because the cacophony of noise robs him briefly of his senses.

The Raging Heaven Cult is tearing itself apart, like a giant driven mad, and Scythas hears every broken bone in deafening clarity. The cruel tumult of cultivators beating their peers to death, seniors crushing juniors they should have been protecting and juniors swarming seniors they should have been looking to for guidance. The unspeakable roar of architectural wonders that have stood proud for centuries, breaking apart and cascading down the mountain in man-made rock slides. The heart-wrenching noise of children abandoning their façades of lofty refinement and wailing in pain and fear.

Scythas hears it all and in those first few moments is nearly driven mad. Two slender hands of ethereal light are what save him, clamping over his ears and blocking out the noise. Normally, something as trivial as a hand’s obstruction wouldn’t have a chance of silencing the wind. But this is no ordinary savior - this is Urania, the true Urania, returned to him now that he’s left the storm.

Breathe, hero. The Heavenly Muse whispers, and for a blissful moment her voice is the only thing he can hear. Now brace.

Scythas grits his teeth and hardens his resolve, and Urania pulls her hands away. Not entirely - just enough to allow in a fraction of the noise, a portion of it that he can handle.

“Scythas?! Scythas! Can you hear me!?”

It’s Jason’s voice he hears first, but it’s Anastasia that he sees. He flinches, drawing back, but the Caustic Queen holds him firmly in place. Jason hovers behind her in plain distress.

“Easy,” Anastasia murmurs distantly, biting her lower lip as she focuses. “Almost there.” By the time Scythas realizes he’s being mended, the work is nearly done.

Together, Urania and Anastasia’s efforts are enough to fully clear his mind of its haze. Scythas immediately casts out his senses and is nearly undone a second time. The first assault was pure, chaotic violence, a hammer blow to both temples. The second is worse. Focused now, Scythas cuts through the myriad voices on the mountain and latches on to the ones that matter most. The reality of the situation strikes him, not like a hammer, but like the lightning fist of god.

“How did it get worse?” Elissa is demanding just out of his sight. She stands with Kyno and Lefteris, and though they lack his hearing, all three of them are Heroic cultivators with refined senses to match.

“We were gone for half the day!” She’s saying, furious as she’s ever been. “What have they been doing?”

“What they’ve always done,” Kino answers grimly.

Lefteris spits it like a curse. “Nothing.”

Scythas is so overwhelmed that it takes him a moment to find his voice. In that time, the Sword Song casts her gaze their way and calls out.

“You three -  this mess isn’t going to fix itself. Are you coming or are you-?”

“Polyzalus,” Scythas gasps, watching the confusion bloom in Anastasia and Jason’s eyes and knowing it’s not enough. He lunges sideways, rising into a crouch, and he howls, “Polyzalus is-!”

The suffocating weight of a Tyrant’s pneuma subsumes them all - eight times in an instant. Scythas heart is already hammering before it happens, but he sees the animal alarm take hold of each of his peers. They stagger as if in an earthquake and the flames behind their eyes flare and overflow, spilling out from their eye sockets into the open air. Scythas, Anastasia, Jason, Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris. All of them waver on the edge of fight and flight as the dread intent of every elder on the mountain encircles them like a clenched fist.

There’s no time left to move, but Scythas forces his battered body to try. He lunges past his peers, down the mountain path towards Polyzalus’ broken domain, and gets three steps before thunder rocks his feet out from under him.

“AETOS!”

He watches in mute horror as tree trunk thick tendrils of molten heat surge up to their eye level and above it, coiling in the skies around the storm crown like burning serpents.

Scythas watches the tallest of the lines contort, and his heart flies up into his throat. He lurches to his feet.

Urania! he cries out, and the Heavenly Muse provides the path forward. Scythas burns his heart's blood, surging along the path of floating stars provided by the Muse and blasting each of the other Heroes off their feet with the force of his passing.

The instant that he reaches the end of Urania’s charted path, the tallest of the burning tendrils snaps like a striking serpent, burning a line of molten slag in the face of the mountain that would have encompassed all six of them had they remained where they were standing. The other five Heroes are still tumbling through the air when the burning whip cracks and lashes forward.

Scythas watches in impotent despair as the First Son to Burn’s opening strike carves a strip out of the city of Olympia and all the lands between it and the Ionian Sea. Less than an instant after that, the other seven elders strike.

It’s like the world is ending.

Urania clamps both hands firmly over his ears again, but she can’t block out his vision. The moment unfolds in perfect silence, so slowly that it’s as if the whole world has been submerged in honey.

Lefteris is screaming, his eyes locked on the distant horizon where the molten line of Polyzalus’ strike ends. The others are less singularly distressed. They thrash like rabbits caught in a snare, turning every which way, but never moving a step in any direction. There’s nowhere for them to go.

Move. Move. Scythas braces his aching legs, but he doesn’t know where to go either.

Urania can’t chart him a path forward without a destination. So even though it threatens to unmake him, even though his muse tells him urgently to stop, he pries her hand away from his ear and calls out to the wind.

Naturally, it answers.

“Oath-breaker!” Aleuas roars. His wrath is echoed by a rising hurricane. “Spineless, conniving RAVEN!”

“Raven?” Scythas breathes through the connection, and in an instant feels the Hurricane Hierophant’s ire narrow to a screaming point. It centers on him.

“You.” The vitriol cuts like a blade. Scythas can feel the Tyrant’s ire as a corporeal burden on his soul. “This is your doing. Do you have any idea what you’ve invited into my domain? What your pretender has wrought upon us all?”

“Solus isn’t-!”

“I should have seen it from the beginning! I thought he had to be more than what he was because he’d taken you as a hostage. I should have seen the signs the moment you brought him to my attention.”

“Signs of what?” Somehow, though the exchange is painfully swift, the world continues to crawl through honey around him. Scythas wonders if he’s dying.

“You were the raven’s hostage, sure enough, but he didn’t take you by force. You ran freely into his open palm.” The man that had promised Scythas his daughter’s hand in marriage snarls in disgust. “Look upon his good work, now, and tell me if it was worth betraying your only ally in this world.”

“You’re lying! Solus didn’t cause this- he was the only one trying to avoid it!”

“Then why is he running away?”

A scathing response rears up in Scythas’ soul.

And then he sees it.

In that frozen moment, Scythas can only stare in abject confusion at the trio of distant specks soaring off the mountain towards the city of Olympia. Solus, Griffon, and Selene are fleeing the mountain at the moment the Son of Rome is needed most.

Not a single one of them is even looking back.

“Again you’ve let yourself be used,” Aleuas hissed through their linked influence. “And this time your weakness has burdened me.”

Where are they going? Why aren’t they looking back?

“Fix this. Bring them down, now, or you’ll never see your brother again.”

Though the Hero of the Scything Squall has no way of knowing it, he isn’t the only one trapped in that frozen moment. He isn’t even the only one exchanging words with a furious Tyrant. Each of the six Heroic souls held hostage by the raven are dealt the cruelest blow any of the city’s Tyrants are capable of dealing them.

They’re told the truth.

Scythas’ heart rebels against his mind. He’s unwilling to believe it, but unable to comprehend the picture painted by their retreating backs.

Where are you going!? Why aren’t you fighting!?

For the first time since Solus picked him up off that mosaic floor in the kyrios’ estate, Scythas feels something other than shining admiration for the solemn Son of Rome. Something dark and nauseating.

Doubt.

The frozen moment ends, torn apart by the force of eight Tyrants clashing, and all six of the staggered Heroes explode into motion.

1.130 [An Unkindness]

“One was more than enough.”

An Unkindness

The Scarlet City falls fully into chaos by the time the Rosy Dawn’s pillars emerge from their closed doors cultivation.

The people of the valley are crude souls by and large. Citizens enjoy places of prominence in the city’s bureaucracy, such is their supremacy, and whenever a philosopher’s sets foot in the city’s humble agora it is nearly a certainty that they will be a scholar of the city’s greater mystery cults. In Alikos, as is the case in most every city state aside from the Coast, the people are defined by their greater mystery cults. No matter an Alikon’s standing, the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk are their pride.

Beyond that, it is the case that many fathers and mothers living in the valley have sons and daughters living up above in one of the two cults. So when initiates of the Rosy Dawn come spilling down the mountain in a horrible frenzy, the panic that erupts is parental as much as it is patriotic.

Only a few minutes after the Young Miss dives into the Ionian Sea, mystikos from the Rosy Dawn descend from the eastern mountain range and run screaming through the streets of Alikos. There is no order to it, only a wild purpose. Lydia Aetos didn’t spring from her bed straight into the sea - her peers had watched her crest the mountain on her way back from the city, and so they retrace her steps as best as they can. They scour the Scarlet City for a reason, a threat, anything to explain the Young Miss’ sudden mania.

Even the most frantic of them are not bold enough to trespass in the Sand Reckoner’s paltry estate, and because of that not one of them finds the answer to their question. All they manage to do is pass along their panic to those below.

In the end, it is the Burning Dusk that seeks to control the situation. Scholars of Burning Dusk stream down the western mountain range just like their peers across the valley, but there is no confusion in their ranks. Citizens and Philosophers alike move through the city with clear purpose, soothing the people of the valley and stopping short their peers from the Rosy Dawn.

It is Gianni Scala’s unseen authority that guides them at first, but when the altercations between rival cultivators turn violent in the streets, it is Gianni Scala himself that takes the situation in hand.

It has been nearly twenty years since the kyrios of the Burning Dusk walked through the valley without a destination in his mind, but there is only so long that he can stare an opportunity in the eye before he blinks. In nearly twenty years the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn, Damon Aetos, has never once allowed his control of the city to slip. The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk knows it may well be another twenty years before he is afforded another chance like this - a chance to undermine the kyrios’ stranglehold over the island.

Unfortunately, the Tyrant’s timing is the worst it could have possibly been. Had he acted just a few minutes earlier, he could have swept aside every conflict and planted his image in the minds of every citizen, metic, and freedman as the steady order to contrast Damon Aetos’ chaotic frenzy.

And had he waited just a few minutes longer, he would have seen the pillars of the Rosy Dawn emerge from behind closed doors before it was too late to turn back.

All of Gianni’s work is undone three times in quick succession - once when the horrible rage of Fotios and Raisa Aetos flares like spread wings across the city, blinding the people of the valley and its lesser cultivators like they’d spent all afternoon staring into the sun. The screaming panic that follows has only just reached its peak when his work is undone again, this time by the wrath of Stavros and Chryse Aetos.

Turning back now, fleeing at the mere suggestion of cultivators that should only exist beneath him, would be to unmake all that he is - unmake what little of him remains. Gianni Scala has no choice but to stay his course. Even then, he is damned.

Shortly thereafter, the Tyrant of the Burning Dusk watches four Heroic Captains descend like falling stars into the valley city, and wonders why he even bothered at all.

Atop the eastern mountain range, Damon Aetos snuffs out the frenzy overtaking his cult like a candle pinched between his fingers. The humbled wise men carry his word through the estates and pavilions, and as abruptly as it came, the mania is gone. The kyrios is here, the wise men assure their juniors. Everything is under control.

It is a long while after that when Heron Aetos finally finds his uncle. The kyrios is in a somber hall forbidden from even the most talented members of the cult. It’s a place that only the scions of the Aetos family are allowed to enter.

Heron approaches hesitantly. He waits until his uncle acknowledges his presence, and only then does he kneel by his side.

The solemn statue of Anargyros Aetos stares dauntlessly ahead. Like many of the statues in this hall, there is a gap where his eyes should be. That isn’t what gives Heron pause. He’s been here before, seen his late uncle’s unsettling stone face and looked upon his empty eyes. That isn’t new.

Heron hesitates because the statue’s eye sockets aren’t empty anymore. His uncle has placed a candle in each of them, one of which is burning steadily away.

“I told you to go with your cousin,” Damon says.

“I did. He told me to track down Rena while he handled Castor, but…” Heron struggles to find the words. “She was inconsolable. I was still trying to snap her out of it when Niko came down the mountain with all of his friends and Castor… and the Sand Reckoner.”

Heron’s uncle doesn’t say a word. The silence is worse than the outrage he’d imagined.

“They left, uncle. All of them. The Sand Reckoner had a ship tucked away in his rags, and Niko - he took Rena and Castor and-“

Heron freezes as warmth like a mid-summer breeze sweeps over him, passing like a wave through the hallowed halls of the Aetos memorial and carrying with it a rosy light that chases away every mournful shadow. He watches cautiously, wondering what his uncle is doing and why, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. The kyrios reaches for the second candle in his brother’s empty marble socket, the one yet to burn, and lights it.

“Why are you here, nephew?” Damon Aetos asks quietly. Heron grips the vestments of his status as a young pillar, unable to look his uncle in the eyes but unwilling to look away entirely.

“The Rosy Dawn needs an heir.” Here and now, the words don’t sound half as noble as they had in his head. His uncle’s silence is a damning confirmation of that.

Heron stands, feeling like a stranger in his own home, and his voice cracks as he passes on the last of his news. “The Sand Reckoner, he told me to ask you-”

“I know.”

What else is there to say? The last of the young pillars flees his uncle’s judgment.

—

“Ask him if he’s checked his math.”

—

The Young Miss-tocrat

Terror for her youngest cousin is what drives Lydia Aetos to dive into the sea and swim after a ship that is already near the horizon. Terror, in turn, is what gives her limbs strength they’ve never had before, allowing her to cut through the waves faster than any of her Civic peers. It’s this terror that clouds her senses, and it’s the terror that doesn’t abate. She knows that it won’t until she sees Myron safe.

Even so, the longer she fights against the current of the Ionian, the more her frantic mind adapts to the terror. It hunts her like a hound, but after some time the Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn is able to separate herself from it and consider her situation.

There are no ships in the Scarlet City’s docks, but it was folly all the same to dive in alone without even an explanation for her fellow initiates. Lydia understands that. There’s no telling when the pillars of the Rosy Dawn will emerge from their closed doors cultivation, but their absence doesn’t make Lydia the fastest swimmer in the city by default. There are dozens of cultivators in the Scarlet City that stand entire realms above her.

It isn’t quite that simple. Convincing any member of the Burning Dusk to act on Myron’s behalf was a risk, one Lydia had immediately deemed unworthy of the time it would take to try. Yet that still left the members of her own cult, the wise men and the proud senior mystikos of the Rosy Dawn. Lydia could have enlisted their help, she knows.

And therein she finds the problem. Even now, she can’t shake his influence.

Lydia remembers the words her fiancé spoke to her so many years ago, then as now with unshakable confidence.

They’re all worthless, every wretched one. Now that Niko is gone, there isn’t a single Sophist in this cult that’s worth your wasted breath. Ignore them. Their help is worth nothing - their judgment even less.

Lydia disregards the senior initiates of the cult out of instinct planted in her mind by Griffon. It’s only after the coast of Alikos has shrunk to a thin sliver on the horizon behind her that she’s finally able to admit it to herself. Was it the right impulse? Has she doomed herself and her littlest cousin both?

It hardly matters now. Lydia gasps through every stroke, pushing her body to the limits of its strength. No matter how far she goes, though, the ship is never any closer. It only grows more distant.

When the distant speck of the ship vanishes entirely beyond the horizon line, Lydia is left alone in the Ionian. She screams in frustration and terror, wasting precious pneuma, and wrings her body out like a wet cloth. Faster. She has to be faster.

Without the visible marker of the ship to guide her, Lydia searches desperately through her accumulated knowledge for a way to keep her path straight. She can swim twice as fast as Myron’s ship, and it will be worthless if she loses her sense of direction and strays the wrong way. She seizes upon nautical tricks every Aetos learns from a young age and discards them just as quickly.

In the end, she finds the answer in her first mistake. The terror - specifically, the frantic, gasping panic it had thrown her into.

Lydia stops swimming and allows herself to float, forcing her breathing under control even as her little cousin gets further away. She falls back on her breathing technique passed down to her by the Sand Reckoner. She allows it to whirl throughout her body in a forever tightening spiral. A perfect, golden thing. Endlessly converging.

Endlessly predictable.

Once, when she was still new to his tutelage and more frustrated than she was reverent, Lydia had thrown a fit in Archimedes’ estate and demanded to know why she could never land a hit on him no matter how she tried. The old philosopher had slapped her upside her head for making a mess of his mess, and revealed a secret that cultivators ten times her age would have killed for without any particular fanfare.

Fool girl. Your every action leaves behind a golden thread: so long as I know where you’ve been, you’ll never hide from me the way you’re going.

It isn’t an application of the spiral breathing technique that she’s even considered before this moment, but the theory is sound and her refinement shines true. Lydia’s awareness of her own pneuma spirals outward behind her, tracing her path all the way back to the shores of the Scarlet City. Ahead of her, it spirals out in reverse, tightening and narrowing into a single point over the horizon.

Lydia cuts through the waves with renewed purpose and clear direction, maintaining steady breaths all the while.

Unfortunately, direction is only one of two parts required.

Lydia’s only indications that her body is slowing are the setting sun and the passage of her awareness through the golden rings of her spiral path. Neither registers to her senses. Such is her single-minded focus that she doesn’t notice her body has given out until she dips her head beneath the waves for another forward stroke and finds she doesn’t have the strength to pull herself back up for air after.

As she sinks into the depths of the Ionian, warmth and light like dawn breaking beneath the waves illuminate the darkest depths of the Ionian Sea. In that moment, Lydia sees with her own eyes the myriad reasons why even the strongest cultivators build ships to cross the seas. And those myriad reasons see her in turn.

The warm light passes her by. The Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn falls deeper into the depths.

When something seizes her by the neck, Lydia turns what remains of her strength upon the creature. She bites and she claws, but it’s like scrabbling at a stone. The creature ignores her efforts, overpowering her without effort, and drags her…

Up?

Lydia gasps explosively as she’s dragged up out of the Ionian, blinking salt water from her eyes and struggling to resolve the blurry image of the creature - no, the man that had saved her.

“Niko?” She chokes out between sputtering coughs. Sky blue flames dance in her swimming vision.

“I can’t decide which of you is the bigger fool anymore,” her cousin says, furious and relieved. He springs from the sea, taking her with him.

The setting sun and salt water spray burns her eyes blind. Lydia doesn’t realize her cousin came after her on a ship until it’s looming like a mountain in front of her face. Through the sun and the spray she can only make out a vast watercolor silhouette. Her first delirious thought is that Niko had taken them all the way back to land in a single leap. After all, how could any ship be this large?

They hit the wooden deck a moment later, and Lydia hardly has time to clear her eyes before she’s tackled onto her back.

“Why!?” Rena wails, burying her face in Lydia’s neck. “Why would you do that?”

“Foolishness,” Castor reprimands her, his voice a cruel, whip crack. “What were you thinking? Aside from nothing at all!” Despite his words, his eyes are wet as they scan her up and down for injuries. Both of them hold on like they expect her to go up and smoke the moment they let go.

Lydia stares up at the scarlet banners of over a dozen sails. She strokes her sister’s head and rubs her brother’s back with hands that tremble from her overwhelming fatigue, and she takes in as much of the ship as she can without turning her head.

To call it a ship at all is a mistake, she realizes. It’s closer to a floating city. In fact, how does it float at all?

“What is this?” she rasps. Her little sister’s wailing drowns it out, but she’s heard nonetheless.

“The Alikonia,” Niko answers, appearing in her vision and bringing a water skin to her lips. Lydia drinks deeply from it, only then feeling her monstrous thirst.

“That’s a terrible name for a ship,” the Young Miss mutters in between greedy swallows.

Niko snorts, glancing off to the side. “Be grateful he named it anything at all.”

Lydia follows her older cousin’s gaze, and sees Archimedes scribbling feverishly onto the ship’s deck with his compass and his stick of charcoal. He’s surrounded by Niko’s Heroic companions - each of them looks livelier than she’s seen them since the night of the wedding. As she watches, the one that looks most at home on a ship leans over the Sand Reckoner’s shoulder and points inquisitively at a circle left half-drawn. Before the Hero can fully vocalize his question, the old Philosopher turns his head and bites the Hero's hand.

The Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss feels some of the tension unfurl within her heart, watching the gaudy pirate Hero yelp and holler at the old wise man while the rest of his companions heckle and laugh. As she watches, a few of them shoot her winks and casual waves. Eight Heroic cultivators, counting Niko, and somehow the Sand Reckoner himself.

Idly, her eyes trail past the group and settle on a frail figure, hunched miserably beneath one of the ship’s many masts and clutching a bucket for dear life. Somehow, Athis looks even worse than Lydia feels. The slave girl smiles weakly when their eyes meet, her relief clear from across the deck, and then the Alikonia dips into a large wave and the girl’s eyes cross. Athis wretches loudly into her bucket.

“What is this?” Lydia asks again. It’s all so surreal that she begins to wonder if she drowned after all.

Niko sits by her head, one leg folded underneath him and the other stretching out. Had his legs always been that long? The odd thought vanishes from her mind when she sees the expression on his face.

Now that Lydia is safe, Niko’s fury is gone. In its place is a razor sharp focus. It’s a look she’s been waiting to see on her cousin’s face since the day Griffon ran away.

“I’ve decided,” Niko says, enfolding each of them in the comforting bonfire of his presence. “I’ve been living in the past ever since I came home. It’s high time I get to know the thoughtless people my cousins have become.”

His narrow eyes burn, locked onto the distant horizon.

“All of them.”

——

“Never asked? What do you mean he never asked- he promised us he’d convince you! He swore! I waited for weeks, for months! And in all that time, he didn’t ask you once?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he knew what I would say.”

——

The Little Kyrios

The ship is far from his best work.

Myron knows that he is tempting the Fates when he pushes off from the docks. The skies are clear that morning, as they have been for days. He’s as rested as he’ll ever be, his pack is full of bread and salted meats, and he plants a full barrel at each end of the skiff - one filled with water, the other kykeon. He has his daggers and three spare sets of clothing appropriate for every season, among various other necessities. He is as ready as he will ever be. Even so, he knows he is rolling the dice when he finally lets fly his sail.

Every young pillar of the Rosy Dawn knows how to sail. It’s one of many skills they’re expected to know before the average citizen has been taught how to read - because of this, the oar is nearly as familiar to Myron’s hand as the pommel of his dagger. In fact, that familiarity is the only reason he pursues this mad venture at all.

Still, working an oar alongside his father is one thing. Building a ship with his own two hands and sailing it clear across the Ionian Sea, further than he’s ever been - alone? That is something else entirely.

The winds are kind enough and the Sand Reckoner’s design is true to his word, and those two facts alone are just barely enough to see Myron through the journey. He realizes, quickly and far too late, that despite the many discarded attempts leading up to the completion of this vessel, he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Either that, or the Sand Reckoner had had a cultivator like Lio in mind when he said a single man could sail the ship alone.

The Hunting Bird’s Breath allows Myron to store bursts of vital energy within the pneumatic chambers he’s carved out inside himself. According to Niko, he’ll be able to use the stored breaths in the future to fuel his techniques. For now, Myron uses them to brute force something that Lio could have done while in full recline.

When the distant sliver of land appears on his horizon, Myron is so exhausted he hardly has the strength to cheer. He does it anyway, of course. There’s no one around to tease him, and his pride in succeeding is its own vitality.

Close enough to taste it, the Little Kyrios takes up his oars and plants both feet firmly against the bench in front of him. He attacks the waves with a vengeance, and as the Peloponnesian coast line grows larger up ahead, he considers his next step.

Crossing the Ionian was the hardest step in some ways, but he still has to find Lio. Olympia is a far larger city than Alikos, and the world beyond it is incomprehensibly vast to the young boy who’s never left his island. Still, even if Griffon had already moved on from this place, Myron is confident he’ll have left his mark on its people. He’ll scour the beaches first. If he can’t find the Eos, he’ll head to the Half-Step City itself. Even if it takes him all night, all day tomorrow, all week beyond that, he’ll find someone that remembers his cousin. And in the worst case, if a month goes by and he still hasn’t found a trace, he’ll search the stands for him during the games.

Myron is so absorbed by his excitement and his plans that he nearly reaches the stone breakwater that buffers the Ionian from Olympia’s dark city before he knows it. In fact, he might have rowed right up onto the distant shore without noticing if not for a sound off his starboard side.

Myron blinks, jarred from his musings, and looks right. His eyes grow wide in disbelief.

There’s a boy drowning in the Ionian.

Myron curses and drops his right oar, seizing the left with two hands and heaving the ship around. Now that he’s listening, he can’t believe he didn’t hear it sooner. The boy isn’t much older than him, if at all, but he’s making enough noise for a man twice his size. He thrashes desperately towards the raised mound of stone that is the breakwater, but as close as he is, his strength is fading fast. His cries for help are muffled by choking panic, loud and clear to Myron, but not nearly enough for anyone at the shore to save him.

A part of Myron wonders how he came to be in this position to begin with. Had he tried to swim out beyond the breakwater as a dare, an act of courage? Had he been cast overboard and left behind? Myron doesn’t stop to ponder. He lays into his oars and brings his ship around, ready to dive in the moment the boy slips fully beneath the waves. Fortunately, he manages to tread water just long enough for Myron to bridge the distance in his skiff.

“Here!” Myron shouts, slipping the right oar from its harness and holding it out for the boy to grab. He latches onto it for dear life, his mismatched eyes terrified and grateful. With his fiery red hair plastered to his forehead, he looks almost like a drowned rat.

Myron hauls the poor wretch up out of the sea, draping him over the starboard rail and letting him cough salt water onto the planks. His nose wrinkles.

With the worst of the danger past, the Little Kyrios speaks his mind plainly.

“What sort of incompetent wretch drowns three stades from a breakwater?” He says it in his Lio voice, because there’s no one around to tease him for it but the boy, and Myron doubts he’ll-

A blade presses lightly against the back of Myron’s neck. Abruptly, like the purging of a curse, the drowning wretch ceases his coughing and lifts his head with a devious grin.

“The same sort of incompetent that falls asleep at his oars, I’d say. What do you think, Pyr?”

“I think you should stop handing our names out to anyone that will listen to you,” the owner of the knife says, exasperated. Myron can tell by his voice and the angle at which he holds the blade that his hidden assailant is a boy just the same as them.

“You worry too much.” The deceiver rolls his mismatched eyes and heaves himself fully up onto the rail, slicking his damp hair back and flicking the droplets of seawater at Myron’s face. “And you’re avoiding the question. Was I right or was I right?”

“He looks the part,” the boy named Pyr admits. “But I can’t say he acts it.”

Myron stares coldly at the deceiver. The irreverent boy leans in, and as he does his pneuma makes itself known. Civic Realm, seventh rank.

“We made a wager, my brother and I,” he confides. “Pyr thinks your sail and your attire are a simple coincidence. But a king’s eye is more discerning. And I think you’re one of them.” They deceiver hooked two fingers in Myron’s scarlet and white silks. Dampened by sweat and sea spray, they are still visibly the uniform of one that contemplates the dawn.

“I’m not convinced,” Pyr says. “Strong enough and skilled enough to sail across the Ionian alone in this ragged skiff, but too dim to see through your terrible acting? I can’t believe it.”

“And I can’t believe you still doubt my plans when they’ve never, ever failed.”

“Never-?”

“What say you?” The deceiver’s grin sharpens. “Are you a scarlet son, or are you a faker?”

Myron speaks slowly, enunciating every word. “I am in disbelief.”

“That makes three of us,” the deceiver says lightly. “Tell us, stranger. Which part of this can’t you believe?”

“The audacity,” Myron snaps, and releases the full force of a ninth rank Civic Cultivator’s pneuma. The deceiver’s mismatched eyes widen, and that is all the response Myron allows him.

A single palm strike to the chest with a full pneumatic chamber’s force behind it flings the deceiver off the ship and sends him skipping like a stone across the water. The pneuma of an eighth rank Citizen flares to life behind him and the boy named Pyr buries a fist in his side.

Myron inhales sharply, taking the pain and feeding his second pneumatic chamber to its limits. He throws an elbow back into the other boy’s gut, and when he doubles over Myron wraps his arms around the boy’s neck and heaves him over his shoulder. The boy chokes as his back slams against the unforgiving rowing bench, knocking the wind out of him and rendering him helpless when Myron grabs two fistfuls of his plain tunic and swings around him three times like a discus thrower before letting him fly out to his brother.

The Little Kyrios spits in their direction and reclaims his oars, both his side and his pride stinging. He wheels the ship around, determined to forget about this embarrassment by the time he makes it to shore.

Unfortunately, the Fates have other plans.

“Hold on!” The deceiver hollers, cutting through the waves now like a shark. Myron ignores him. He’s nearly at the breakwater now. Would have been there already if not for the event that he’s already forgotten.

Four hands hammering insistently against the hull of his skip destroy his short-lived hope. Myron rounds on the two wretched brothers scrabbling at his ship like starving dogs and brings his oar to bear.

“Wait!” Pyr shouts. Myron beats them both savagely over the head with his oar instead.

“Ungrateful, worthless, conniving, deceivers!” Myron rages, each word punctuated by the crack of his oar. “I’ll drown you both myself!”

In between curses and pained yelps, the nameless deceiver shoots a victorious look at his brother.

“I told you.”

“Peace!” Pyr cries, ignoring him. His eyes are mismatched, the same as his brother’s, but they’re far more earnest. Or maybe he’s just a better actor. Myron twists at the hips and swings with all his might. Both brothers lurch back in abrupt alarm, recognizing the swing for what it is - a killing blow. They’re too slow. Pyr recognizes it and flings himself sideways, putting himself between his brother and the oar.

Myron drains his second pneumatic chamber, exhaling it in a rush and stopping the swing in the middle of its motion. It makes his body creak in concerning ways, but it’s worth it to see the look on the smug deceiver’s face.

“Peace,” Myron echoes, throwing the word mockingly back in their faces. “In which barbarian land does peace come at the edge of a blade?”

“The knife was for show,” the deceiver protests. “He didn’t even try to use it!”

“In which barbarian land does peace come in the form of a clenched fist?”

“You struck my brother first,” Pyr says, meeting his eyes steadily. Myron sneers.

“Then if neither of you intended to attack me, why didn’t you just ask me where I was from?”

Pyr glances back at his brother, whose face promptly flushes.

“It seemed like something he would do,” the deceiver mutters. Myron’s brow furrows.

“What?”

“Forget it! We’ll start fresh,” he declares, heaving himself up out of the water and offering Myron his hand. “Be glad, boy - in fifty years you’ll have a story to tell your grandchildren. The story of the day you met the king.” His grin is roguish, and Myron can tell he means every word. “My name is Leo, and this is Pyr.”

Myron stares at them both, pointedly ignoring the offered hand. The “king” lets it hang, unbothered by his silence. His brother, Pyr, looks almost apologetic as he clambers over the rail.

“How old are you?”

“Ten,” says the king.

“Eleven,” says his brother.

Myron glares at the deceiver. He refuses to even think of his cousin’s name in relation to this wretch, let alone acknowledge it.

“We’re the same age.”

“So?”

“So don’t call me ‘boy’ like you’re any different!”

“I am different, though.” Mismatched eyes glitter. “I’m a king.”

They squabble like this while Myron’s skiff bobs idly just outside the breakwater, heedless of the setting sun and the distant shadow of encroaching storm clouds. The trio of young Civic cultivators continue on, blissfully ignorant of the approaching storm.

Until they hear the thunder.

“AETOS!”

Myron wheels around mid-sentence, his breath hitching in reflexive terror. He’s a split second faster than the two brothers, and because of that he is the only one that sees what happens next.

In the furthest distance that a Civic cultivator’s eyes can see, countless threads of vibrant light coil and arch up into the sky.

Beautiful, Myron marvels in spite of his terror.

Then the tallest of those heavenly threads cracks like a whip and crosses the distance between horizons in the time it takes his heart to beat once. The whiplash strikes a burning line from the distant city of Olympia all the way down to the breakwater.

The dock city explodes.

1.129

The Son of Rome

The Oracle’s blade was adamant-wrought. It plunged through her throat without any resistance, parting flesh and cartilage as if it wasn’t there at all. Calliope’s breath hitched as she weakly twisted the knife-

I caught her wrist and pressed my thumb against the flat face of the dagger’s hilt, locking it in place. The Oracle choked on a sob and jerked her head sideways, seeking to tear the knife out sideways one way or another. I palmed the golden crown of her head and held her fast. Her eyes quivered as she stared up at me in despair. She looked like she was a thousand worlds away.

A fraction of a second. The woman was weak and delirious, not even a Heroine like her daughter. If I’d seen it a fraction of a second sooner, if I hadn’t been weighed down by the weight of thirty men - it didn’t matter. I’d been too slow, and her children had never had a chance to stop her. They’d both been too busy fighting for air, drowning in her presence, to notice the tightening of her fingers around the knife.

The moment Calliope had choked out her final word I’d seen the blood drain from Griffon’s face. At that moment, she could have stabbed him instead of herself and he wouldn’t have noticed until he came to in the underworld.

For an excruciating moment, they traded one haze for another. Two sets of scarlet eyes stared without comprehension at the knife lodged in the Oracle’s throat.

Thin rivers of blood spilled out from the seams around the wound. Selene cried out. The spell broke.

Griffon’s pneuma flooded the room, projections of the Rosy-Fingered Dawn surging across the Oracle’s body and converging on the knife. The first pankration hand to brush against the sliver of exposed adamant was cut open as easily as the Oracle’s throat had been, spilling golden essence like blood from its sudden wound. The same thing happened to three more before Griffon snarled and seized upon the knife with his own flesh and blood hands.

The Oracle thrashed with all her might, but for all that this unnatural place had preserved her, she had still been languishing in a bed for sixteen years. The full force of her Majesty put up a far greater fight, dragging me back across time and vast distance to Egypt’s cruel deserts. It burned, and it blinded. It was not enough. I held her head and her hand still while Griffon’s pankration limbs swarmed like locusts over her body and pressed her down into the bed.

“Amma!” Selene wailed. The girl that rushed into the space between Griffon and I was neither the solemn guardian of the Scarlet Oracle’s absent temple, nor the mischievous Heroine that yearned for wider worlds. Selene grasped desperately for her mother, and in that moment she was every bit her age.

A stiff palm wreathed in lightning struck Selene in the chest and viciously shoved her back, followed swiftly by eight more.

“Back!” Griffon snapped.

“She’s dying!”

“She’s not. I won’t allow it.”

The scarlet flames behind Selene’s eyes flared up as she burned her heart's blood, fighting through the muscle spasms and peeling lightning leeches off her body one by one. Her chest heaved like she was running a marathon. The glory of a Heroic cultivators pneuma poured out of her and clashed against Griffon’s, pressing it back.

“The knife,” she gasped, reaching for it, “take out the knife-!”

We were clustered so closely together that when I raised my leg and struck out sideways, it was more of a stomp than a kick. I caught her unprepared in the side of her knee with all my strength and weight behind my foot, and it was just enough to send her stumbling.

“You’ll kill her if you do,” I said firmly when she turned to me in betrayal. “The blade is plugging the wound.”

I was far from a medico, let alone a physician - that had never been my role in Gaius’ legions. Odds were good that even just a few weeks of Anastasia’s guidance and his prior understanding of anatomy had made Griffon my better in medical pursuits. Still, I’d seen enough men bleed out to know that a blade like this was best left sheathed.

“Not enough.” Selene dragged herself up by a bed post with a topper carved like a pine cone. “She’s still bleeding out!”

“I know.” I could almost visibly see the outpouring of Griffon’s pneuma into the Oracle's body. His influence wrestled Selene’s - no, that was too kind a word. It mauled the Heroine’s frantic glory like a cornered animal. If I had possessed Selene’s vision or Anastasia’s surgical perception, I had no doubt I’d have seen him attacking Calliope’s wound with the exact same ferocity.

Griffon’s eyes were wide open, his golden hair rising up on lightning currents and giving him an underwater appearance. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen such a look on his face.

“Wait- wait! The nectar!” Selene reached for my arm but stopped herself just short of jostling it. Instead, she gripped me with a look. “If we pull it out, the nectar will-“

“Seal the wound,” I realized. A drop of the elixir had fixed a broken spine. Calliope, on the other hand, had received a full cup. “Griffon, we can-“

“Be silent,” Griffon seethed. I finally placed his expression.

He was terrified.

“The nectar isn’t working,” he went on furiously. “It isn’t even trying to close the wound. Worthless fucking piss wine, it might as well be running from the blade!”

A memory that wasn’t mine speared up through the crashing waves of panic. Words from my boyhood mentor, though he hadn’t spoken them to me.

Mortal means can’t kill what divinity cursed to live forever.

But adamant could.

“It’s the metal,” I told him urgently. It was little more than mad intuition, and if I was wrong her death would fall entirely on my head. But it felt right. “Adamant stifles ichor. We have to take it out.”

“She’ll bleed out.”

“Only if the wound itself has the same properties. If not, the nectar will close it.”

“Her life isn’t yours to roll bones for.”

“We have to do something!” Selene insisted.

Griffon bared his teeth and turned his violent intent on the room around us. Two of his pankration hands tore the sheets from the bed and ripped them apart, burning the strips that were soaked through with blood and pressing the clean ones to the edges of the wound. The rest of his manifested hands took to the sparse furniture in the room, smashing lounges and tables apart then seizing upon their broken pieces.

Half a dozen blindingly bright hands dove down into his shadow and emerged holding the swords he’d stolen from the storm crown. They took to the broken furniture with their blades like they were oversized carving knives, shaving away strips of wood at blistering speeds. He carved over a dozen wooden daggers, imitating the shape of the Oracle’s knife, and discarded every one of them before turning his violent intent on the swords themselves.

Terrible seconds passed while Griffon tried and failed to break a suitable imitation of the knife out of whatever was at hand. Wood. Iron. He even clawed up the marble from the floor and tried to break it into shape. His intent was clear enough - if we pulled the knife out, and the nectar took too long to regain its potency or else never regained it at all, we could staunch the blood flow with a blade of the same shape and a less poisonous material.

It wasn’t going to work. Griffon knew it, too - he admitted it by flinging the last of his marble attempts against the far wall so hard they exploded into powder.

“We need a surgeon,” he said, and when Selene didn’t immediately respond, he hauled her towards the door with twenty hands of his intent. “Now! Every surgeon you can find!”

Selene struggled out of it, slipping out of the scarlet silks the hands were dragging her by and planting her feet in a wide stance. She would have looked fierce, standing there in her ornate armor, if not for her clear panic.

Griffon struck her with pankration fists and furious influence, and she screamed right back in his face.

“There are none! My father sent them all away!”

“Search the mountain, then! Search the city! Swim to Egypt if that’s what it takes!”

“There’s no time!”

Griffon strangled a sound of wrath and looked to me. “We need Anastasia.”

“We left her in the storm.” I watched the pupils of his eyes shake, and saw the golden path go up in flames.

Griffon and I pulled the blade out together while Selene guided us. Griffon’s pankration hands blurred forward the moment it came free, three fingers jamming into the wound to fill the sudden gap. The rest pressed fresh scraps of cloth around its edges.

I stepped back from the bed physically as well as mentally, and I watched them struggle. Griffon tried cauterizing the wound, tried every internal trick Anastasia had taught him, and fell back on his own instincts when all of those failed. Selene whispered tearful prayers to her faceless bisected corpse god, to the late kyrios, and to the Scarlet Oracle’s patron muse - or perhaps to her mother - while she scraped every last bead of moisture from the discarded cup and dabbed it to her mother’s tongue.

It was all of it in vain. Calliope lay in a shallow pool of her own life blood, no longer resisting through force or Majesty. The mark of a sunkissed physique was tan skin, scarlet eyes, and hair like spun gold. The Scarlet Oracle only matched two of those descriptors now. Her face had grown ghostly pale. Her scarlet eyes were glassy and unfocused.

In the end, she died looking up at her children. In that final moment, to my lying eyes, she almost looked content.

Her final breath was simultaneously far less and infinitely more devastating than the cyclone we’d weathered at the gates.

Griffon staggered back from the bed as it rolled over us, slipping on a trail of blood and falling to his knees. He reached for one of the pinecone posts to pull himself up, but abruptly froze. He stared at his blood-soaked hand, transfixed. Selene, for her part, slumped across her mothers corpse and buried her face in her hands. The sobs that followed shook her whole body.

Calliope’s final breath swept over us like the kindest expression of her Majesty. It passed as a wave of warmth and soft illumination, chasing every shadow from the room and spreading out beyond it in a soothing flurry. It went beyond the terrace, out towards the false horizon with its painted sunset, and then further beyond that. For a brief moment, all the world knew warmth and rosy light.

The moment passed. In the aftermath, the only sound to be heard in the sovereign suite was Selene’s wracking sobs. In my mind’s eye, the golden path burnt away entirely. Ash on the wind. Its smoke filled my lungs and made my eyes burn.

Without warning, the false sunset went out like a snuffed candle, plunging the suite into darkness. The light of false stars shimmered weakly, casting faint shadows, and then one by one they all went out too. In seconds we were immersed in true darkness. The only light remaining came from the flames behind Selene’s eyes, and even then it was only the slightest glow seeping out from between her fingers.

There was a man standing in the doorway.

Prometheus’ ichor roared inside my chest, drowning out everything else. My spear was still in my shadow. In this darkness, I only had to flex my fingers and it would be there in my hand. I didn’t dare try.

The silhouette standing in the empty frame didn’t move either. It was too dark to make out any of its features, even its outline. All I could tell was that it was far too large to be a mortal man. Maybe too large to be a man at all.

A rattling cough broke the stillness, and a sliver of torch light shone forth as a Hero’s eye cracked open.

The light was weak, little more than flickering sparks, but it was enough to illuminate the towering figure of the Tyrant Polyzalus. I saw immediately in his face all the features that didn’t match up between Selene and Griffon. He stood taller than all of the other Tyrants I had convened with on the mountain, broad-shouldered and lean. The shadows clung to his face, shrinking only from his eyes. They were scarlet. They were dread.

Dymas hung limp and broken in his grip. Every bone in the Hero’s body had been broken, his sword arm had been ripped off at the shoulder, and the skin that wasn’t covered by bloody cloth and melting bronze was burnt black. In some places his body was still smoking. He’d only cracked one eye open because the other had been gouged out and cauterized. For all intents and purposes, the Hero that the Raging Heaven Cult had called the Butcher and the Aetos brothers had called companion, was already long dead. His spirit simply hadn’t admitted it yet.

Somehow, in spite of all his injuries, Dymas managed a smile. That torch light bore into me. Searing to my soul.

“Rise-“ the Hero rasped.

Polyzalus crushed the man’s skull in his fist.

The Butcher’s last gasp howled loud enough I was certain it would tear the entire suite apart, but not even a breeze passed through the doorway. Full dark fell once more, but I could see it now. Polyzalus stared blankly at the corpse of his wife, and their daughter sobbing over her. The stench of cypress smoke filled the place. If I had been breathing, it would have sent me into a coughing fit.

Years passed. Or maybe just a second. The Tyrant’s dread gaze slid away from his wife and daughter, to me. Then further, dipping down to the scarlet son, kneeling motionless and staring at his own bloodied hands and the adamant knife that one of them still held tight. He took in his Rosy Dawn silks. He took in his stolen sword. He gazed upon Lio Aetos.

And he rendered judgment.

“Die.”

The word of a Tyrant in his domain was absolute. What Socrates and Dymas had called ethos, the crushing pressure I had always known as authority, seized both of us and crushed our hearts to pulp.

There was no resisting it. This was nothing at all like the deep sea pressure Jason’s pneuma had imposed upon me. It wasn’t a power-play from a Tyrant too wary of a stranger to fully commit. No intimidation. No restraint.

Selene jerked up, hands flying away from her face as she finally registered her father’s arrival. “Appa, no!” Far and away too late.

The First Son to Burn attacked Griffon and I with every ounce of his hatred and his strength. We had no choice but to perish.

As the darkness of grim Tartarus crept in and my body shut down alongside my mind, the titan’s ichor burned brighter than the sun. Too little… too…

“Why?”

[Late]

Life returned to my tripartite soul in a heady rush, and I inhaled a greedy breath of smoke-stained air before my mind could think better of it. I doubled over, coughing so hard my vision swam and my throat tore and the taste of blood filled my mouth. Selene appeared at my side, shielding me from her father and bracing me so I wouldn’t fall. I welcomed all of it, and I wondered how it could be.

The Tyrant’s death sentence had been real. More than that, it was still there. I could feel it like a blade pressed against the back of my neck, like a hand wrapped around my heart just waiting to squeeze. For some reason though, the blow didn’t come. It waited. Why?

Old ‘Zalus turned his head and cast his dread glare back out into the hall, towards a steadily growing glow.

Socrates appeared in the ruined hallway, a lantern swaying in his hand. He looked like he’d run sprints from Olympia to Egypt and back again, drenched in sweat and hobbling like he was every bit his age. His eyes, though, were as sharp as they’d ever been.

“Why what?” The First Son to Burn spoke without any inflection.

“Why do they deserve to die?” Socrates asked, coming to a stop just a few feet away from Dymas. The old philosopher gestured at the mangled corpse with his lantern, grim shadows swaying across it with the motion. “This man betrayed your trust and attacked you in your home, endangering the lives of hundreds in the process. You could argue his death was righteous. But what have these children done to deserve the same sentence?”

“They killed my wife.” The blade of his authority bit into my neck.

“They only came here to help,” Selene spoke up, her voice raw from sobbing. Even so, she drew herself up and mastered her shuddering breaths. She faced her father in grief. “They brought her nectar just like I told you they would, and it worked. She woke up. She spoke.” The Heroine’s voice cracked. “I finally got to meet her, appa. That’s all they came here to do. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

The Tyrant’s dread mask cracked as he looked upon his daughter. Just for a moment.

“They used you, little heart,” he said softly. The blade dug deeper. “From the very beginning they played you for a fool.”

Selene shook her head angrily, but the battle was lost.

“A witness has presented her case,” Socrates interjected, each word heavier than the one that came before it. “Who are you to ignore her testimony?”

“I am Polyzalus. I am king.”

“These two are members of the Raging Heaven Cult, entitled to the judgment of their peers. Killing them here and now before their guilt can be determined flies in the face of the code you swore yourself to uphold when you arrived here in Olympia.”

You lack context, Dymas had declared with perfect certainty, and I felt the truth of it now as Socrates wove into existence a prison around Polyzalus that I could barely perceive in the first place - let alone understand.

“Where is Justice to be found in an execution without fair trial?” Socrates, pressed. “Where is Temperance in a good man’s full surrender to wrath? Where is Wisdom in the neglect of a hundred dying citizens for the one that’s already dead?” All the while that he spoke, the whispering threads of the Gadfly’s rhetoric wound themselves around the Tyrant and his sovereign suite. They spread like spiderwebs, entrapping him.

“Where is Courage in the murder of a child?” Socrates thundered, and the death sentence fell away from my soul.

This is how a Philosopher stood against a Tyrant. Not with cataclysmic violence like the Butcher and his blade, but with intent. By means of ideology. Searching not for mortal blows, but aiming instead at the foundation of the monarch’s strength.

“The sunset king wouldn’t act in such a way,” Socrates asserted. Every line was a grating buzz. “The First Son to Burn wouldn’t leave his subjects to die while he pursued his own petty vengeance. He wouldn’t disgrace the power vested in him by Burning Dusk by turning it against children. This isn’t who you are.”

Trapping them within the boundaries they had built for themselves, the framework they had designed over the course of their life. A prison fit for a king.

“I don’t care.”

Of course, that was assuming the king cared at all for his kingdom.

Polyzalus didn’t even try to debate the man known far and wide as the Scholar. Instead, he immediately conceded the point and accepted the consequences. His dread authority fractured at its foundation, visible in the sudden flood of real sunlight as the illusion beyond the veranda dispersed and the world outside the estate was revealed to us. And us to the world in turn.

Invisible smoke like raging forest fires flooded the room, seven new strains all layered one atop the other, as every Tyrant scattered across the mountain turned their gaze upon old Polyzalus.

The dread mask broke along with his foundations, and the First Son to Burn bared his teeth in visceral hatred. Hatred for the Gadfly, for his rivals, or for us? It could have been any. It could have been all. It hardly mattered now.

The incomprehensible sensation of a Tyrant’s rising pneuma blanketed the mountain and spilled over like an avalanche, washing over the Sanctuary City of Olympia.

The indescribable burden of seven more rose up to meet it. In the distance, light bloomed in the Olympic stadium as hundreds of Heroic souls reared up in instinctive fight or flight.

The Tyrants spoke up in their multitudes. Each of their voices was a grim and rolling thunder.

“I should have known you’d be the first of us to burn.” Leonidas of Infernal Frenzies.

“No man exists above the law, least of all you.” Drakon of Broken Tides.

“It isn’t too late. Cast away, dive deep, and this need not be the end. Even you can be reformed.” Solon of Brazen Aegis.

“Another treasure wasted on the waves.” Midas of Waning Wax.

“Not like you at all to afford us such a blind spot.” Thalestris of Blind Maidens.

“Enough.” Ptolemy of Scattered Foam.

“So I swore, and so shall I stand.” Aleuas of Howling Winds. “Strike the first blow, raven. I’m with you.”

Socrates met my eyes from across the hall.

“Run.”

Seek safer shores.

I spun on my heel and seized Griffon by his hair, bounding across the room and leaping over the edge of the veranda. Selene followed a split second behind us, her scarlet heart flames blazing. We soared clear over the edge of the mountain and all of its madness, the force of our jump carrying us fully to the shimmering city of Olympia. Behind us, eight Tyrants flexed their strength for the first time in centuries.

Kaukoso Mons erupted.

1.128 [Selene]

Selene

Her father wasn’t a monster.

He wasn’t a good man either, and oh, that had stung the first time she acknowledged it. But Selene wasn’t naïve. She had seen too much of him reflected in the hearts of those that sought her counsel. Some said it was impossible for a cultivator to enter the fourth realm without being tainted by its trappings, and eventually Selene had been forced to admit her father was no exception to that rule.

That wasn’t all there was to him, though. The man known to some as the First Son to Burn, the kyrios to others, and Old ‘Zalus to others still, was first and foremost her father. He was all of his titles, and he was none of them in their entirety. He had done monstrous things, some she knew of and almost certainly others that she didn’t, but he wasn’t a monster.

The man that had raised her, the portion of Polyzalus that was her father, was someone Selene wouldn’t trade for anyone else. That side of him loved like no monster could ever love, more than any man without a beating heart should have been capable of loving.

Heartless? Is that what they told you? How could I be heartless when I have you?

Selene’s father loved her desperately, and no matter what the other oracles or the late kyrios himself had to say on the subject, she knew he loved her mother just as much. In some ways even more.

The daughter of an oracle was destined to live a lavish life. The daughter of a Tyrant was just the same. Growing up, Selene had never wanted for anything that could be wrapped up in a bundle and dropped in her lap. The only things she had ever truly wanted for were those her father could not give her - things that only the kyrios had the power to provide. Freedom. Companions. Her mother. However, while her father couldn’t give her mother back, he could share his memories of her.

Selene knew her father loved her mother more than anything else on this earth, because his memories of his wife were the only gift he refused to give her freely.

Only on her birthday would her father share some of his shining recollections, because sharing made them less - though he never told her how. Some memories he’d never shared at all, no matter how she pestered him, such was his love for them both. It was only because she was his daughter that he gave her any of those moments at all.

Selene loved her father, and she loved the glimpses of her mother she had seen through his eyes as well.

She knew he wasn’t a good man, but in the deepest reaches of her heart she believed that he could be. If only he could be free of this mountain. If only he could see her mother smile again. He was a man in terrible need of an oracle’s counsel, a true oracle’s counsel, and there was finally a path forward for him to receive it.

So when she came rushing into his domain in search of a raging lion and was instead swept up into a worried father’s crushing embrace, she returned it. When her father confined her to his domain and forbade her from any external communication, Selene fought only until it became clear he wouldn’t budge. And though it chafed every day that followed, she resigned herself to doing what she could for those within the sunset domain.

Because Selene trusted him. And because she knew the cure was on its way. With or without her, Sol and Griffon would see it done. The nectar would come.

Days passed. Weeks. All the while she offered up her sacrifices and prayers to the Fates and Muses above. She never lost hope. She never strayed in her purpose. And in time, her patience was rewarded.

The Fates answered.

—-

The first strike split her father’s domain in two.

It happened instantly. Far faster than she could track, let alone react to. As if a giant had driven into the mountain with an ax, the small city of estates was split down the middle like a log.

The sound of it was indescribable, like an earthquake and a rock slide and the shattering of a thousand bones all compressed into a single moment. It happened so quickly that Selene could only observe the aftermath, her vision swimming as she picked herself up from her temple’s marble floor.

A new scar marked Kaukoso Mons. From the base of the mountain all the way up to the sovereign estate her father called his own, a trench had been carved out of the mountain. It was so deep that an elephant could have fallen in and vanished entirely from view. The impossible result of an impossible attack.

Selene was so dazed by the shockwave, so distracted by the torrential rain of falling rubble and the screaming of her fellow mystikos, that she almost didn’t notice the sudden tidal wave of violent struggle flowing in from the rest of the mountain.

She didn’t have Scythas’ ears, but Selene was still a Heroine. The moment the enemy struck and broke her fathers veil against the outside world, Selene heard everything that he had been keeping from her. The Raging Heaven Cult was at war.

Selene didn’t have time to process any of it. In the time it took to raise her head from the floor, her father had answered the unspoken challenge to his authority.

“You dare!?”

The First Son to Burn appeared as a wrathful silhouette against the setting sun, his voice thundering reprimand that made her ears ring and her teeth vibrate. The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk struck out with a lashing hand and gripped the empty air. Cords of writhing flame appeared in his fist, like they’d always been there, and the flames that burned on every rooftop in the sunset city rose up to answer his call. They spiraled one and all up into his clenched fist, like the reins of a horse.

“You dare attack what is mine - my people, in my city?”

The very world around her warped, the distant city of Olympia and the storm crown overhead burning away like leaves cast to the earth. In their place emerged a city Selene had only heard stories of. A city of scarlet wonder.

The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk took the reins of his domain in hand, bolstering every aspect of himself at the expense of every aspect of those within its borders, and the intruder was no exception-

No. That wasn’t right. Selene blinked the stars from her vision and stared up in bewilderment at the burning lights above her head.

“Your city?”

The first attack had split her father’s domain down its center. Somehow, impossibly, the flames burning on the roofs of the estates east of the chasm weren’t rising up to the Tyrant’s fist.

“Even a Tyrant’s greed has limits,” a sonorous voice rang forth from the base of the mountain. Selene remembered it. “Only half of Alikos belongs to Burning Dusk. The setting sun has no place within the eastern sky.”

The silhouette of Polyzalus cracked his reins and pulled a thousand screaming stallions from the flames west of the chasm. As he did, his other hand reached out to the setting sun and pulled from it a kopis sword.

“Turn over every stone on every street, tear from the roofs their shingles!” the Tyrant intoned furiously, and the city had no choice but to tear itself apart. In this place, his word was more than heavenly law. This world was his word. “You won’t find a single rosy finger! Show me a rising son that dares oppose my rule - do it, and I’ll show you half a corpse!”

And yet. somehow, the flames east of the chasm refused to come when he called them. Somehow, they were changing before her eyes. Shifting colors. Becoming…

“As you wish.”

Rosy.

[The dawn breaks]

Several things happened at once.

Like shattering glass, the eastern half of her father‘s world broke apart and scattered, revealing the Raging Heaven Cult and distant Olympia once more. Every member of the Burning Dusk on that side of the fault line lurched up out of the rubble and the broken streets like they had been burned and fled blindly in whichever direction was least obstructed. On the western side of the city, the one within her father’s control, every man, woman, and child arched up until it looked like their backs would break and screamed silently up to heaven. Every amethyst vein in the mountain flashed so bright it seared their lines into her vision.

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk rose up and struck her father like a comet flung from a ballista, and nine bolts of lightning fell from the storm crown above to strike them at their joining.

The triumphant cry of a heavenly chorus rose up to accompany an outpouring of glory and a Hero’s passionate might as the man they called the Butcher advanced to the ninth rank of the Heroic Realm.

Selene ran.

—-

Selene was only sixteen years old, but she knew more of Heroes and Tyrants than most. She was a Heroine herself, and had seen the acts of Tyrants in the hearts of those that sought her out, and in the dreams the late kyrios warned her not to turn away from.

None of it had prepared her for the reality of a Hero and a Tyrant’s clash.

She ran towards the sun, moving faster than a hunting cat, and yet it felt like she was wading through mud in comparison to her father and the Butcher. The impact of their blades striking one another shook the air and made the sun beams waver and distort like a desert mirage. One such impact would have been jarring enough on its own, but they moved so fast that it was less a series of blows, and more a single uninterrupted clash. The mirage effect deepened and spread as the seconds passed, as if the sun was bleeding out across the sky.

Her father’s domain churned like it was made of ocean waves instead of marble and clay. Buildings that had stood for centuries before Selene was born exploded at the touch of a stray attack, or simply shook themselves apart as the mountain rocked and heaved underneath. Stallions of blood-orange flame raced through the air above her head at blistering speed, hundreds of them charging the Butcher head on while hundreds more raced circles around him, seeking to tangle him up in their trailing reins.

Polyzalus was the greater of the two of them and it showed in every exchange. More than that, he was a Tyrant in his own domain, even if half of that domain had somehow been contested. Every lash of his blade trailed an echoing boom, swift enough to outpace the wind and strong enough to cut through anything short of adamant. The fight should have been over in an instant.

Yet, despite the fact that he was as an ant before a lion, the Hero’s pneuma did not once waver. It flooded the world around him, pressing back against her father’s unshakeable authority as it grew, and it didn’t stop.

What did it mean for a Hero to fight a Tyrant? It was a topic that lent itself well to sophistry because it happened so rarely outside of epics, and it was the nature of a thinking man to gnaw at any topic that couldn’t bite them back. Some said a clash between the two was a clash of passion against purpose. Others, especially here, likened it to the kindling of a democratic flame. Once, Selene had heard a poet describe such an event as spring usurping summer.

They were wrong, each and every one of them so laughably wrong. This was no high minded exchange. There was no poetry in this. Selene ran like she had lightning in her heels, and with every step she only grew further away from the unraveling of her home.

She knew she wasn’t slowing down, that the Butcher was instead raising the pace of the violence at an unbelievable rate. But still, she couldn’t shake the illusion. She had dreams like this. Outlandish, abrupt, and always given away by her body’s inability to keep up with her mind’s demands. For a cultivator, that was only ever a concern in one’s nightmares.

In fact, maybe this was a nightmare. The more she thought of it, the more it rang true. What else could this possibly be?

Rattled and afraid - afraid for her father, afraid for her defenseless mother, afraid for the people of the Burning Dusk and the Raging Heaven Cult - Selene didn’t notice how close she’d come to the bisecting line until the vibration of another clash broke the stone beneath her right foot, and sent her stumbling sideways nearly over the edge of it.

The shadow of her hallowed weapon - and surely that was another point in the nightmare’s favor, because she had no recollection of grabbing it - stretched across the bisecting chasm, the penumbral spear sliding briefly into the contested half of her fathers domain.

Rattled and afraid, and most importantly, off-balance, Selene was caught entirely off guard, when a hand shot out from the eastern shadows and seized her penumbral spear like it was a corporeal thing. When the hand yanked the shadow back it brought the actual spear along with it. Selene was dragged across the fault line, beyond the boundary of forever dusk-

“No!”

-and out of her father’s world.

She fell into the shadow of a courtyard ruin and immediately called upon her full strength. She was too slow as it was. She didn’t have time for this. She-

“Solus?” She whispered. The son of Rome drew the veil back from his face, and his eyes all but lit up the broken courtyard. They were silver-bright. She had never seen such intensity.

“-you hurt? Selene?”

She gasped, forcing her treacherous limbs into motion. She seized him by the shoulders.

“What have you done?! Why are you here? You can’t-” she searched his soul reflexively, vainly, hoping he had somehow transcended eight ranks since the last time she had seen him. But no. He was burning hot to every one of her senses, but he was still a Philosopher.

“I came to make right what Bakkhos left wrong,” he said, and her mind reeled as the name rang her mind like a gong. He glanced up at the brutal reality of high minded discourse, and though his eyes narrowed, they didn’t dim at all. They only grew brighter. “I was naïve, but it’s not over yet. We can still salvage this.”

“Are you out of your mind?” she hissed, shaking him by the shoulders. Without her heart flame to bolster her, it barely moved him. “You’ll die. No, you have to leave now! Do you understand me? You’ll-”

Solus covered her mouth. The skin of his hand was burning heart. He looked alive.

“I didn’t come here to die,” the son of Rome told her, smiling fiercely.

Ah. So she was dreaming after all.

A burning war horse slammed through the last column still standing in the ruined courtyard, screaming and thrashing in fury and pain. The spell broke and Solus bolted in through the rubble, pulling her along like a banner until she found her feet.

They raced up the mountain together, their paces somehow evenly matched despite her higher standing. He moved like a ghost, and bounded like a hunting wolf through the shadows cast by the setting sun.

Above their heads, Selene watched her father’s personal militia join themselves to his efforts. Men and women she knew by name after years being guarded by them rose up against the Butcher, senior Philosophers in the dozens. She watched them mount burning war horses and charge up fracturing mountain paths like they were flat road. She saw them cast rhetoric of every kind at the everburning star of the Butcher, each of their techniques bolstered beyond their mortal capability by the man that held the reins.

The Butcher swept them aside in the dozens as they came, cutting through flesh and living flame without breaking the rhythm of their exchange. Those that were knocked back deeper into the western hemisphere of her father’s domain were caught and cast up again, all but the worst injuries burning away like they had never been.

Those that the Butcher had cast down into the eastern hemisphere received no such protection. They broke, and they bled, and they burned where the war horses touched their skin.

It took an eternity too long, but finally Selene regained her senses.

“This is the end,” she realized.

“Not yet.”

Dread stole the swiftness from her steps until she was standing still, watching the rubble of her home and the broken bodies of its people rain down. Solus seized her penumbral spear again, but this time she just let him rip it from her hand.

“There’s still a path forward,” he told her, earnest as she’d ever heard him.

Selene shook her head. “No, not anymore. My father won’t stop until one of them is dead, and winning will cost him just as much as losing. This is what the other Elders have been waiting for this whole time. This is the opening they’ve been looking for.”

“It’s not too late to stop them,” Solus insisted, and she grit her teeth as steam gathered at the corners of her eyes.

“No one on this earth can stop my father,” she said, defeated. “Not even me.”

“Not even his wife?”

A second raven joined the first, bare chested and radiating vitality. From his black feather cloak he pulled a golden cup. Selene’s heart skipped a beat in her chest.

“Is that-?”

Solus offered her spear back to her. She took it.

—--

The sovereign estate of the Tyrant Polyzalus sat near the top of the territory allocated to the Burning Dusk Cult by the kyrios. It was a grand monument, larger than the next two largest estates put together, and it was where her mother had slept for sixteen years since her daughter’s birth.

The ravens ran out of shadows large enough to stalk through the moment they entered the estate, but that didn’t stop them for a moment. When the first of the guards sworn to her mother’s service raised the alarm and struck out at them with burning rhetoric, Selene hesitated for half a step. It only took her a moment to override her instincts - these were her mothers guardians. She had grown up begging them to tell her stories - but in that time Solus and Griffon acted.

Shields shattered and rhetoric parted like water around them when they struck. Griffon punched and grappled with pankration hands alive with rosy heat, and when the disciples of Burning Dusk tried to overpower his foundational technique with their own, he blindsided them with palms of crackling lightning. Solus charged through armored men like they were children, and when Griffon’s pankration hands offered him up a weapon it had scavenged from the floor, he launched it down the hall with a siege construct’s punishing force.

Selene knew she wasn’t a fighter. She never had been, and her father had never pushed her to become one. she knew that, and yet somewhere along the way she had deluded herself into believing the rising tide of advancement lifted all ships. She had never seen a battlefield with her own eyes, and only rarely set foot in the gymnasium, but she was still a Hero. Surely, if the need arose, she would rise to the occasion.

Griffon and Solus ripped through the halls of her father’s estate like violence incarnate, never once betraying themselves in hesitation, and the term martial cultivation clicked into place inside her mind.

In this regard, they were far more than their standing suggested. And by that same measure, she was far less. For the first time, Selene wondered if an oracle could still serve if they walked the martial path.

She’d have to ask her mother.

——

The sovereign suite was quiet.

It didn’t make any sense at all, but then, it never had. Here, it was always serene quiet, and the sun was always setting just past the veranda. Her father had made a sanctuary of this place by overriding the kyrios authority with his own. Here, and only here, the kyrios had allowed it.

Not for any affection between the two of them. Bakkhos allowed the sovereign suite’s construction out of consideration for the woman housed within it.

They entered like a calamity, Sol’s lowered shoulder and Griffon’s violent intent tearing the bronze door out of its frame and sending it skidding across the unbroken marble floor. The moment they stepped foot inside, however, they went still. Their chests heaved while their pupils shivered, the terrible thrill of it all still very much within them. But no more than that.

Warm light from a false sun spilled across the Oracle’s sleeping figure and illuminated the portions of her mother that her father loved most. The delicate slope of her neck, the soft, half smile her lips always tended towards, the nails she had always painted the color of her faith.

The Scarlet Oracle Calliope lay at apparent rest on her birthing bed, looking for all the world like she was only resting briefly. The only sign that gave lie to the illusion was the ornamental knife resting flat over her stomach, her limp hands folded over it. The same knife she had used in her last waking act to cut the cord connecting her to her newborn daughter.

Selene whispered the same prayer she always did as she stepped into the silent suite. Her voice shook, but only a little.

Griffon took a single step forward, then looked down as if seeing himself for the first time. He ripped the raven’s mantle off and cast it aside. In his hand he held the cup of nectar.

“Are you sure?” Selene asked in a hushed voice. Her heart beat like a cornered rabbit’s. Her mind was in half a dozen places, but in her mother’s peaceful sleeping face was all she could focus on. She didn’t know what she would do if he told her now.

“I’m sure of what I’ve seen,” Griffon answered, an odd wonder in his voice. He took another careful step towards the nursing bed. “And I’m sure they’ve never tried this.”

“Nectar from the Flame,” Solus said, quietly, suddenly by her side. “If this isn’t enough, nothing will be.” Though she couldn’t have explained why, Selene remained rooted in place. Solus remained by her side, steady as a stone.

Griffon paused, inhaled and exhaled, and took the final step towards the bed.

The manifested hands of his violent intent dipped beneath her mother’s head and lifted her gently until she was halfway between prone and upright. Griffon watched her carefully for any signs of discomfort, and at the same time he drank the sight of her in with his eyes.

Solus sucked in a breath, like he’d been sucker punched. Selene didn’t have a fraction of her attention to split.

With one of his true hands, Griffin cupped the Scarlet Oracle’s jaw, and applied just enough pressure to part her lips. With the other true hand, he pressed the rim of the golden cup to her tongue. He tilted the cup, slowly, torturously, and Selene was certain every moment was going to be the last before she woke up from this terrible and incredible dream.

Finally, after ten eternities, Griffon drew back the empty cup. He didn’t say a word. None of them did. They only watched. And waited.

Waited.

… Waited.

“No,” Griffon said in quiet disbelief.

“More,” Selene said. “Give her the rest.” When neither of them moved, she gripped Solus’ elbow so hard her knuckles turned white. “Where is the rest of it? You had to have made more than one cup.”

Solus laid a hand over hers and gently pried it away. It trembled in his grip.

“That was all of it,” he told her heavily.

Griffon snarled. “All of it but a drop.”

Solus looked sharply at him. “A drop wouldn’t have made the difference.”

No. Not like this.

“It made the difference in that healing house.”

She refused.

“And you just fed her a thousand times that portion.”

Selene would not allow it.

Griffon’s retort died in his throat as she appeared by his side and dipped her finger into the cup. His livid glare turned to razor focus as she ran her finger around the inner rim of the cup. She raised that wine-stained finger to her mouth and took for herself the drop that had clung to the sides. The taste was everything she had ever loved, combined and accentuated by perfect harmony. An impossibly good flavor.

Her oracle’s eye opened wide, and Selene looked upon her mother with a higher power’s sight.

And she saw it.

The cord cutting blade had a handle of polished gold, dented and shaped in such a way that the oracle’s hand would sink perfectly into it when she grabbed it. Selena marveled at how natural it felt to hold as she pulled it from her mother’s listless hands. She saw the questions in their eyes as she raised it above her mothers head.

“Growing up,” a stranger murmured in her voice. She felt as if she was a thousand leagues away. “When my father wanted to comfort me or the kyrios wanted to rile me, they would both tell me the same thing.”

You are all the greatest portions of your mother.

“I took something crucial from her the day that I was born.” The nectar burned brighter than a star in her oracular sight, nearly as bright as the golden light pouring out of them, and it coursed through her mother’s body in search of a catalyst that was no longer there to be found. Her majesty.

The adamant blade cut through the skin of her palm like It wasn’t there at all.

“I have to give it back,” she declared, and poured her blood into Calliope’s open mouth.

She watched it tread the same path as the nectar. She watched it join itself to the heavenly elixir, building, burning-

The oracle’s finger twitched.

There was a reaction. Some sound, an exclamation. She didn’t hear it. She was a thousand leagues away, and at the same time she was frozen in this perfect moment. She watched the blood flow. The more of it the nectar found the more that burning wonder was bolstered. Like a seed planted in the hollow of an uprooted cypress, the Oracle’s scarlet majesty steadily bloomed.

Someone said something. She ignored it. A few moments later she was rewarded with the slightest flicker of motion behind the Oracle’s closed eyes.

Almost. Just a bit more, and-

Sol heaved her bodily away from the bed and the Oracle’s eye slammed shut. Selene gasped like she had been drowning, abruptly aware of how cold she felt. The adamant knife slipped from her fingers.

“Enough,” the Roman said firmly, lowering her to the floor when it became clear she wasn’t fighting him. “If the first barrel wasn’t enough, a second won’t help.”

“I saw it,” she told him, standing under her own power and letting warmth slowly return to her body. “It’s working. It’s so close, she’s so close, we just -“ her voice cracked. “We were so close.”

Sol left an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into it, breathing shakily and struggling to see-

Selene froze. “Griffon. What are you doing?”

“Giving back,” he said, and drew the adamant edge across his own scarred palm. He dropped the bloody knife back onto the bed and cupped his palms together. He held them above her mother’ mouth and let the blood pool. He was going to ruin it.

Selene lurched forward in terror, only for Sol to plant his feet and heave her back again. She burned her heart’s blood and called upon a Hero’s strength.

“Watch,” Solus urged her. Her body betrayed her again. She hesitated.

Griffon closed his eyes and mouthed something silently. Then he parted his cut hands a fraction, allowing a strand of blood to fall into the Oracle’s open mouth.

Calliope gasped.

Selene’s entire world shrank down to a single point - her mother’s face. She watched speechlessly as her nose wrinkled, and her eyebrows drew down. She watched the Oracle’s lips purse at what was no doubt an unpleasant taste left behind by human blood. She watched as her golden eyelashes fluttered.

Selene watched her mother’s scarlet eyes open for the first time since she was born.

The full weight of the Scarlet Oracle’s majesty flooded the sovereign suite. Burning heat and scouring rosy light filled every corner of the estate and spilled out over the veranda, reaching out to the false dusk outside. It was like standing in the center of a bonfire. It felt like never being cold again.

Calliope stared up at the man above her, a thousand emotions playing behind scarlet eyes. Then, finally, she spoke. Her voice was brittle from disuse, and soft with wonder.

“Who are you?”

Griffon smiled like the sun, and answered.

“My name is Lio Aetos. I was born eighteen years ago beneath a scarlet sun and swaddled in an oracle’s veil. I am the first and only heir of Damon aetos.” With every word, her mother’s wonder deepened. Her lips parted, her eyebrows arched.

Griffon leaned in, and their features were a perfect match.

“I am your son, and I came all this way to see you.”

A moment and an eternity too late, Selene realized the emotion behind that wonder wasn’t Joy or excitement.

“Stop!” Solus roared, lunging past her.

It was grief. It was dismay.

With tears in her eyes, Calliope condemned him.

“Liar.”

And she drove the adamant knife into her throat.

1.127

The Son of Rome

“You’ve done well,” the Hero said. Both Griffon and I stared at the towering cultivator, utterly thrown, and he laughed. “Not what you expected?”

“Not quite,” I said warily.

“We haven’t made many friends here,” Griffon added.

The Hero chuckled, eyes crinkling in fond recollection. “No, you’ve made a beautiful mess of this place. It’s to be expected that the bees won’t be happy when you kick their hive. If you ask me, though, the schemers deserve every gray hair you’ve given them.”

Griffon relaxed ever so slightly, his arm no longer an iron bar around my shoulder. I eyed the jovial Hero.

“May we pass, then?”

“Of course not.”

The Hero waved his hand through the air between us, brushing off Griffon’s poisonous glare. “None of that,” he chided. “Appreciation of good character doesn’t change the world around us, nor our place within it. This is the Burning Dusk Cult or near enough to it, and only members of its faith may enter without an invitation.”

“Some would argue that the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk are one face,” I said.

“Some would,” the Hero agreed, placing gentle emphasis on the first word.

Griffon cast his own words mockingly back. “Let’s speak candidly.”

The Roman portion of me grimaced and cursed my idiot brother’s lack of diplomacy. The part of me that was Greek readied itself for a fight. All the while, the Titan Flame’s ichor beat a tattoo against the spokes of the wheel inside my chest, burning hotter and hotter every second.

The Hero inclined his head. “Fair enough. Old ‘Zalus won’t tolerate a single one of Damon Aetos’ ilk inside of his domain, least of all one of his Young Aristocrats.”

Griffon didn’t rock back on his heels, nor turn his face as if he’d been struck, but he might as well have done both. The utter stillness of his expression gave him away clear as daybreak. When his eyes flickered down, it only drove the point home.

Since our flight from the Scarlet City, Griffon and I had been through our fair share of misfortune. We had been battered by cultivators in back alleys and sand pits. We had sailed across the Ionian and then further, up the Aegean and back, in just a few days each way. We had weathered the cruel blizzards of northern Thracia as well as the unnatural storm that hung eternally above Kaukoso Mons. We had been beaten down time and time again by the man known as the Gadfly.

We had lived.

In that time, my attire had changed frequently. It wasn’t a question of aesthetics. Though my roots were patrician, the legions had long since disavowed me of such vanity. No, it was a question of practicality. My Rosy Dawn attire had already been ruined before we stole the Eos, marred by months of slave work. The indigo silks of the Raging Heaven Cult that I’d acquired after my bath were finely made, but they were still ceremonial. Our midnight marauding had all but unmade them by the time Socrates thrashed me.

In the end, the Gadfly had given me his own battered breastplate from his days as a hoplite, and that was the only piece to survive our trip to Thracia untattered. The tunic had nearly made it through, only for my bastard horse to tear it in half during our struggle outside the Orphic house.

Even the grimiest vagrant had to change out their rags eventually. Yet somehow, throughout it all, Griffon had never once given up his Rosy Dawn silks.

He had worn them negligently, shrugged them off his shoulders, and walked around with a bare chest while they hung from his belt, and their designs had been marred by blood stains and tears long before Olympia was a sliver on our horizon. The months that followed had only added on to the damage. They’ve been almost unrecognizable as early as that morning.

But Prometheus had made us well, from the hair on our heads to the tips of our toes. Even our clothes have been mended. For the first time in centuries, the Gadfly’s bronze breastplate glimmered pristinely without a single dent or scratch. And for the first time since our escape, Griffon’s scarlet silks stood out proudly to anyone that cared to recognize them.

Red sun rising, more scarlet thread then there was white. More than just a mystiko’s attire. Griffon's renovated robes marked him as a young pillar.

“My compliments to your tailor,” the Hero said easily, breaking Griffon’s tense silence. “I’ve seen good men give up after far less abuse than what you put those robes through.”

“You have us at a disadvantage,” I put forward, mind racing as I did. Where was the path forward?

“In more ways than one,” the Hero agreed.

“Who are you?” Griffon asked, intent. The Hero tapped the flat edge of the blade that hung without a sheath at his hip. It was an ugly, wicked looking thing. Too broad to be a sword and too long to be a cleaver.

“They call me the Butcher in this city,” the Hero said thoughtfully, and though there wasn’t a hint of a threat in his voice, I felt the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. The Butcher hummed, then shrugged. “But you can call me senior brother.”

Griffon snorted, unwinding his arm from my shoulder and stepping forward. He had to tilt his head back to meet the Hero's eyes, but he still managed to make it look like he was staring down his nose at him.

“If you know enough to recognize me by my station, you should understand this much. A Young Aristocrat has no senior brothers outside the airistois. I’ll call you elder.”

The Hero abruptly grimaced. “Please don’t. I’m not that old.”

“Weathered Hero,” Griffon suggested.

“Even worse.”

“Ancient chain breaker-”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tell me then, senior,” Griffon continued archly, “why can’t your juniors pass?”

“I already told you old ‘Zalus won’t allow it,” the Hero said in bemusement.

“And if we have good reason to be here?” I pressed him, vividly aware of the brawl that continued to rage further up the mountain. A distant roar, but not distant enough. “We have something Polyzalus wants. Something he can’t get for himself. A gift.”

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I can count the number of such gifts on one hand.”

“Nectar to cure his wife,” Griffon said, and the Butcher’s other eyebrow rose.

“That would be one of them.” The Hero tapped the hilt of his blade and cast his eyes skyward. “Though your chances might be better if you threw in a golden apple to sweeten the deal.”

He didn’t believe us. That was fine. We’d expected as much.

“What if we could prove it?” I said, finally stepping onto the golden path forward. “What would your answer be then?”

Or so I thought.

The Butcher shook his head. “Still no.”

“What?” Griffon hissed.

“You could convince me the sky was a hammer and its anvil the earth - it wouldn’t change a thing once you passed through those gates,” he said, tilting his chin at the gateway behind him. “That’s old ‘Zalus’ world. And you’ll never convince him of a thing.”

“We have proof-”

“It doesn’t matter. He’d cast his wife into the sea before he fed her anything from the Rosy Dawn.”

“And if you took it to him?” I asked, though I knew Griffon would never accept such a solution. “If it was your hand that offered the cup?”

“Even then. Your role in this arrangement taints it.”

“Selene told me her father loved her mother,” I challenged him. “She told me he’d do anything to see her made well. Are you calling her a liar?”

The Hero stepped back, leaning against one of the carved columns that marked the boundary between the Burning Dusk faction and the rest of the Raging Heaven Cult. He glanced up at the stone relief that each of the columns together propped up - that of a towering king riding in a chariot, reins in one hand and the sun in the other.

“Tell me,” the Butcher bade us, “what do you know of the First Son to Burn?” Griffon and I shared a look. “No, you’re right, this isn’t a lecture and I’m far from a philosopher. Let’s start smaller. What do you think a Tyrant is?”

There were some questions that existed without definitive answers, whetstones for the mind that mentors used to challenge their pupils. It tested the portion of the mind that lay dormant while a student memorized the truths of the world that weren’t up for debate. On the other hand, there were questions that could only possibly lead to one conclusion - questions that the Pythagorean’s and their like pursued tirelessly.

Somehow, I knew this question was both at once. There were countless ways to define a tyrant, and for all that that was true, I knew the Butcher would only accept one. I could spend my entire life searching for that answer and there was no guarantee that I would find it.

I could only tell him the truth as I saw it. As I had seen it in the darkness of command tents, in the bondage of iron chains, in the grip of mad visions - and in the weeping of this Half-Step City.

What is a Tyrant?

Griffon and I answered a question with an endless number of possible answers at the very same time, and then, impossibly, our answers were exactly the same.

““A prison.””

The Hero snapped his fingers and pointed at us like we’d given away a secret. “That right there. That’s exactly why.”

“You didn’t say we were wrong,” Griffon noted.

“I didn’t.” The Hero sounded pleased, but the heart flames behind his eyes were burning low now. “Because you’re right, of course. The problem is, you don’t know why.”

His heart flames flickered, and a sullen glow began to seep through his blade. Within moments, it looked like it was fresh from the forge and ready to be quenched. He nudged the pommel of his ugly cleaver and the blade swung in its belt loop, tapping lightly against the marble pillar behind him.

A line of fire like a hairline fracture appeared in the marble column, beginning at the point where the cleaver marked it and spreading in whisper-thin lines. It surged down the column and across the mountain trail, encircling us before Griffon or I could act. It spread ravenously, as if the butcher had scattered invisible lines of sawdust at our feet.

Then as quickly as it had begun it was complete. The flames kept burning but spread no further. And as we jerked back and spun in place, I saw that the Hero's display had been more than a cheap intimidation tactic.

The Butcher had painted a man’s silhouette on the mountain in flames, and he had placed us in the center of it.

“Most people your age would say a Tyrant is a ruler,” the Butcher explained patiently, as if nothing had happened. “For most, it’s synonymous with king. An Egyptian might call them pharaohs, and Anatolians might instead label them emperors. No matter where you go, so long as there is a city of men, so shall there be a Tyrant.”

He paused, waiting, and when neither of us said a word his grim approval grew.

“Most Greek men your age would have denied that sentiment just now,” he observed. “We call them the free cities for a reason, don’t we? Surely a Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn knows how the great city-states are governed.”

Griffon’s sneer was answer enough.

“And even the Roman must have some experience with enlightened governance,” the Butcher set his sights on me, his tongue as sharp as any cleaver. “In its time, the Republic was a city without kings, was it not? That principle was its very foundation. How did it go again? Ever an empty throne? No, not that. For every crown, a dagger? Hmm. Maybe it was-”

“Thus always to tyrants,” I said quietly. The Butcher grinned.

“There it is. So tell me, boys, in a land of noble republics and democratic city-states, why didn’t either of you speak up just now?”

Because he hadn’t been wrong.

Satisfied, he continued, “Those were answers any man your age would have given, but you two aren’t just any men, are you? You’re cultivators.”

The lines of flame and the silhouette of a man shifted. Not moving, exactly, but giving the illusion of movement. Some of them burnt low, shrinking down to amber outlines in the stone, while others brightened and surged up to greater visibility. The effect started at the edges and rippled inward, giving off the illusion that the man was shrinking.

When the flames settled again, the brightest of them had formed the shape of a man no taller than Griffon and I.

“A Greek cultivator would have almost certainly viewed this question through the lens of their refinement,” the Butcher explained. “In that sense, a Tyrant is more than just a ruler of men. A Civic cultivator might have said that a Tyrant is someone in the fourth realm. They might have said a cultivator is someone who has climbed thirty steps on the stairway to heaven.”

The Butcher rapped his blade against the column and threads of flame seeped out from the silhouetted man, emanating from his head.

“You boys are Philosophers, though, and the world looks different to a thinking man than it does to a citizen. A Philosopher might have said a Tyrant is a man that sought refuge in ethos at the expense of logos and pathos. A Philosopher might have called such an existence the unavoidable fate of any great man given enough time to stagnate - curiosity fades and passion burns out, but no man is ever truly free of his hunger.

“A Philosopher might have said those things, especially one that benefited from the teachings of men like Aristotle and Socrates.” The Butcher's heart flames flickered, and the silhouette rippled and grew. “But not you two.”

“Give us the Hero’s answer, then,” Griffon challenged him. “Tell us what old ‘Zalus is to you.”

He did. “To me, Tyrants are the men that hold me hostage in my own soul. They’re the ones that spend my heart’s blood like it’s their own, though of course they lack the hearts to pump it. They are the weight of Heaven pressing down, the tribulation that persists long after the lightning has struck. They are far more than just the king - they are the kingdom.”

The Butcher shrugged. “Simply put, they are a prison.”

“You won’t let us pass,” I said slowly, “because our answers are the same.”

“Our answers are the same,” the Butcher said, pointing at Griffon. “Not yours, son of Rome.”

“The Tyrants must have spent your hearing along with your blood,” Griffon said scathingly. The Butcher easily ignored him.

“On each answer, thus far I’ve spoken as the authority,” he said, “but just as a Hero sees the world differently from a Philosopher, so too does the Tyrant know a different world. Fortunately, I’ve received a Tyrant's wisdom in my time - I can pass that answer on to you.”

The burning silhouette grew larger again, recapturing its original size.

“Tell me, raven,” the Hero bid, “what does a Tyrant see when they look into a mirror?”

Ill fitting armor; tailored to my frame and yet three sizes too large. It was how I wore it that was to blame. It was the same reason why the creases in my uniform looked sloppy, yet the captain’s pristine white cloak looked shamefully untested. I was wearing the mantle of a greater man, and I did not fit.

“A prison,” I answered for the second time. The Hero bowed at the waist and flourished his empty hand.

“Both of your answers are correct, but they come from different places. Worse than that, they come from higher places.”

He couldn’t have chosen a worse way to phrase it. Griffon’s pneuma rose, pankration hands rising up around him like the wings of an eagle.

The Butcher openly admired the manifestations of his intent, neither threatened nor insulted. “In all my years and all my travels, I’ve only seen three manifestations of intent as elegant as that. Do you mind?”

As he asked the question, the arm of the burning silhouette beneath our feet peeled up from the stone and grass, at one of the floating hands of Griffon‘s intent. Without hesitation, the rest of Griffon‘s pankration hands tore it apart.

“I do,” Griffon said, belatedly, after the last of the sparks and embers had fallen and sputtered out.

“Fearsome.” The Hero tilted his head. “Strange, though. Even the least of a Hero should be greater than the entirety of a Sophist. Those hands of yours are stronger than they should be. I wonder…”

The Butcher abruptly ceased his play acting and speared Griffon with the full weight of his focus.

“Tell me, son of scarlet faith. What is the first virtue?”

Griffon lifted his chin. “Justice.”

The burning silhouette flickered and went out. The Butcher sighed and leaned his head back against the gateway pillar.

“I thought so.”

It was infuriating, watching the knot unravel itself in his mind while my own only grew more tangled. Griffon’s response had solved a mystery for the Butcher and I had no idea what it was, or how it had been solved. The Titan’s ichor burned hot inside my chest, feeding my frustration.

I was sick and tired of Greek diplomacy. Humoring them only made them worse. I lacked the patience for whatever this was.

Worse than that, I lacked the time.

“Such terrible purpose,” the Hero said without opening his eyes. “Casting you as the master was well reasoned.” He pointed two fingers at his closed eyes, then at mine. “That’s an old man’s glare. You’ve been put through your paces, haven’t you? Seen the sights. How old were you the first time you killed a man?”

I thought about lying in either direction. Decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “Fifteen.”

The Butcher hummed. “And how old were you the first time you ordered a man to die?”

Griffon’s pneuma rose. Mine did not.

“Seventeen.”

Salt and ash.

“Most tragedies never see the light of a night fire.” The Hero cracked a burning eye open, regarding me like a moderately intriguing riddle. “Though you may not see it that way. Blindness is a common affliction among men of your stature, isn’t it?”

Griffon’s eyes narrowed, tracking the implication in a split second. I waited for the Butcher to spell out what we both knew to be true.

“Blind to the reality of things. Blind to the harm. A commander spends enough time playing toy soldier in the sand, eventually he forgets that his men aren’t really made of stone. Do you remember his name, captain?” He dipped his head, bright eyes burning. “Do you remember the look on his face when you told him it was his time to die?”

I caught Griffon’s lashing hand and forced it down.

“His name was Calvus,” I said. “And I’ll remember his face long after I’ve forgotten yours.”

Heart flames flickered. “Do they make every man like you in Rome?”

“No. They make them better.”

He considered me. “What is the first virtue, son of Rome?”

“Gravitas.”

A smile returned to the Butcher's lips, slight but deeper than before.

“I promised to speak candidly, so candid I shall be. You two are in over your heads. You think you know that, you think you understand, but you don’t. And how could you? You’ve only been given a portion of the script. The most important portion, true, but in some ways that’s worse.”

The Hero raised four fingers, each one burning with a different colored flame.

“There are four cardinal virtues that stand sovereign above the rest. Temperance. Wisdom. Courage. And Justice. We tell countless stories of the men and women that embodied these traits in the past. But do you know how many of us pursue any of the cardinal four directly?”

The Hero didn’t wait for us to hazard a guess. Instead, he lowered one of his four fingers.

“On this entire mountain, including you, there are three.”

“Liar,” Griffon said at once. “Courage is the Burning Dusk’s creed.”

Passion stoked the flames behind the Hero’s eyes.

“Courage is Polyzalus’ creed. Why do you think his peers were so eager to band together against him when you asked?”

“One less rival,” I said at once.

The Butcher clicked his tongue. “Not good enough. I’ve given you half the answer - this unkindness you’ve brought about is only possible because you named Old ‘Zalus as your target. Why?”

Because the Tyrants lacked agency. Because none of them were willing to act first and risk the retaliation of the other seven, and my negotiating as the Raven had allowed them to act without acting. Because… A dozen reasons sprung immediately to my mind, but not a single one answered the question. Either because the premise he’d put forward was flawed, or…

“The rest of them can leave,” Griffon answered, and the Butcher inclined his head.

“They could, and that is part of it. They won’t, of course - not while the other seven are watching like hawks, and not if they can take the indigo throne for themselves. But the fact remains that they could. They could leave this city and challenge their successors back home. They could even win. It’s a cold comfort, but it’s enough to ground them.”

Unspoken but plainly heard went the rest - Polyzalus had no such comfort. It had been nearly two hundred years since he ruled in the Scarlet City, and even if he could cast out his successor in the Burning Dusk, it would make no difference. Damon Aetos would be there to meet him at the shore.

“But that alone wouldn’t make Old ‘Zalus a threat worth banding against. The day the young Scarlet Oracle’s spirit marble broke apart, this mountain very nearly followed suit,” the Butcher explained, tapping the heel of his foot lightly against the stone. Amethyst veins flashed brightly, absorbing the force. “Understand this - none of the Tyrants on this mountain were a match for the kyrios, but in his absence I wouldn’t bet against the First Son to Burn in any single contest.

“This isn’t about sophistry - this goes beyond platitudes. I told you once already that the world grows clearer the further you advance. What a Citizen can only pay lip service to, a Philosopher can picture in their mind’s eye and a Hero can plainly see.”

He pushed off from the gate, pacing a slow circle in front of it.

“The vast majority of cultivators don’t cultivate virtue and never will. Of those that do, the vast majority will cultivate virtues so humble that we don’t even have names for them. The greatest of us are the souls that pursue the cardinal four, but they’re a fraction of a fraction. The only ones fortunate enough to survive the consequences of their hubris.”

My brow furrowed. “What hubris?”

The Butcher laid a hand over his face, obscuring it.

“The hubris to look upon the face of god and decide your features would suit it better.”

This is justice. Remember its face.

The knot loosened.

“To cultivate a virtue, to actually cultivate a virtue, is to challenge every man that came before you in its pursuit. Challenge it, or shape yourself to it. The greater the virtue, the longer the shadow it casts. For those that pursue the cardinals, tribulation is more than a grim possibility. It is a certainty. The closer you tie yourself to them, the more this holds true.

“The two of you wear your virtues like second skins, and you’re still blind to it. Just looking at you is like watching children juggle knives.”

“Like boys playing at war,” I murmured. Words from an old advisor.

The knot unraveled.

A spat between two children could go either way unless one of them had a knife. An adult would thrash a child ten times out of ten, but if that child had a knife they might be able to catch the adult off guard. Wound them, if nothing else. But either way, no matter who their opponent was, a child with a knife was as much a danger to themselves as their enemies.

A year ago, in the harvesting wheat fields beneath the Rosy Dawn, Griffon and I had cautioned his younger cousin against chaining himself to a virtue too soon. We had used ourselves as the examples against it, though we hadn’t said that part out loud. Yet even then, the shackles in our minds had been purely metaphorical.

“You boys lack context and that much is bad enough. But worse than that, you lack perspective, a sense of scale-”

“No.”

The Hero ceased his pacing and raised an eyebrow at Griffon. “No?”

“We may be lacking in every other regard,” I added, “but there is no man on this mountain richer in perspective than us.”

The Butcher frowned. “Have I been talking to myself this whole time?”

“Of course not, senior,” Griffon said. “We heard every word. But you’re still wrong.”

He crossed his arms. “Prove it then. Convince me that you understand the consequences of what follows if this plan of yours runs true.”

“How?” I pressed him. “What will be enough?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Griffon and I shared a look.

Then as one we struck the Butcher with the memory of freedom’s wings.

We were hardly more than fresh Philosophers, and he was a Hero, but in this case the message far outweighed the messenger. The Butcher‘s eyes flew open wide, his mouth falling open as the indescribable fury of the Phoenix and the Titan Prometheus ran wild through his mind’s eye.

And then he started laughing.

The Hero laughed the way only drunkards and the truly deranged could, doubling over with the force of it. It was a hysterical sound, the sort that could turn to violence as quickly as camaraderie.

We were halfway to the nearest shadowed overhang when the Hero clapped his hands and straightened up, smile wide and eyes blazing.

“I was wrong about you two. All these months I thought you were nothing more than victims of your own upbringing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, could it? You’re out of your minds.”

Griffon smiled right back, sharp and genuine. “We scarlet sons are all the same.”

The Butcher chortled, stepping away from the sunset gates and clapping us both on the shoulder. In my mind’s eye, the golden road glowed bright.

“More fool me for doubting. I should have known better - he always gets his way.”

Griffon blinked. “Old ‘Zalus?”

But the Hero had already set his sights above our heads, and in the next instant his influence shot across the mountain in seven grasping currents.

“Show’s over,” he called. “Come on out and take a bow.”

I followed his influence with my own, the same way I had followed the smoke signals of a Tyrant’s wandering eye the night of Bakkhos’ funeral. And just like that night, I found Heroic souls at the end of every line.

“This is the last chance anyone will ever give you, and one more than you deserve,” the Butcher told us, heart flames still burning brightly despite the heavy words. “Leave this city and never come back. Return to your island in the sun and spread to others the wisdom you’ve been given. Improve this world as any mortal man can, in the small ways that matter most.”

Griffon rolled his eyes.

“I refuse,” I said simply. The Butcher chuckled and clapped our shoulders before moving past us.

“In that case, a word of advice.”

Of the seven Heroic cultivators that the Butcher’s influence had grasped, only two of them were known to me. One of those two flickered and vanished, fleeing as soon as the butcher marked it. The other one, along with the five I had never encountered before, converged on us from all across the mountain in seconds.

Six Heroic cultivators appeared in a rough circle around us, one from each of the branch factions on the mountain, sans the burning dusk, and the blind maiden. The only one among their number I recognized, the Hero from the Broken Tide with the shark-tooth smile, looked like an entirely different man than he had the last time I saw him.

He looked furious. And nervous.

They all did.

“You’ve made good use of the tools you’ve been given,” the Butcher spoke to us, ignoring the bristling ring of interlopers “But shadows and smoke aren’t enough to make up for what you lack. A Hero's senses are so much sharper than yours that they don’t even need their pneuma to spy on you. They’ll see you long before you see them.”

“What is this?” One of the Heroes demanded, a man nearly the Butcher’s size from the Waning Wax cult.

“Whatever you’re playing at, Butcher, this isn’t the time,” a Heroine from the Scattered Foam bit out, fingers white as they clutched her sword and shield.

A slew of similar demands followed. The Heroes from my alliance were here to take me to their Tyrants so I could explain myself and be struck down if they saw fit. The Heroes from the Infernal Frenzy and the Brazen Aegis had likely been sent to kill us.

The Raven’s shadows hadn’t fooled them. If the Butcher hadn’t drawn them out, we would have never known they were there.

“Always remember,” the Butcher said, utterly unbothered by the rising volume of their demands and their hostility. “No matter how high you set your sights, you’re still stuck down here in the mud with the rest of us. Until the day that that’s no longer true, there’s only one thing that truly matters.”

The Hero from the Broken Tide shouted a warning and glory like crashing tidal waves exploded from his hands. Tense as they had been, the rest of the Heroes surrounding us were only a fraction of a second slower to levy their own foundational techniques.

They were all too slow.

“Strength,” the Butcher intoned, and swung his cleaver around.

Six Heroic cultivators crumpled to the ground, each of their chests a cauterized ruin. Faster than I could track, the Butcher had caved in each of their chests and obliterated their hearts.

The flames behind their glassy eyes had already guttered out by the time I realized the enormity of what had happened. I didn’t have time to shout. I could only grab Griffon’s arm and brace for the impact.

Gravitas.

The weight of three thousand men cratered the mountain and slammed me to my knees a split second before the last gasp of six Heroic souls struck Griffon and I like a tornado. I clenched my eyes shut and grit my teeth, battered from all sides and every angle. Griffon latched on to me with every single one of his pankration hands, and even still he was nearly flung off the side of the mountain.

When the last of their vitality was spent and my own virtue’s retribution had passed, I forced my head to rise.

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk strode casually past the broken corpses of six of his peers, twirling his ugly cleaver in his hand.

“One last thing,” he said, glancing back at us just short of the entryway. “I owe the young miss a great deal. Look after her, will you?”

Griffon reached out, caught between following him and helping me rise. “What are you-” The next word froze in his throat.

“Wait,” I ground out, forcing myself up onto one knee. The golden road was crumbling. We were so close. “Wait!”

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk had cast his cleaver aside, and from a fold within his traveler’s cloak he’d pulled an expertly crafted blade. One that Griffon and I had seen once before -

From a fold in his cult attire Anargyros Aetos pulled three swords, each of them a work of art that he had long discarded - blades that hadn't lasted long in his hands. "I only have these scraps to offer you now, but once the work is done we'll find you each a weapon worth wearing on your belt."

- through the eyes of Stavros Aetos.

“You,” Griffon breathed, at the same moment I recognized the memory of a man changed by twenty years and three realms of refinement.

His name was Dymas, one of four slaves to join Damon Aetos and his brothers in their journey to rescue the Scarlet Oracle.

“Twenty years I’ve waited. I won’t wait another second.”

Dymas swept the shining blade back and forth, heart flames roaring as his Heroic pneuma rose. With every step he stood just a bit taller. He rolled his shoulders as if he was shrugging off the weight of the world, and his eyes crinkled in pure and honest joy.

“Here I come,” he sang, striding through the gates to the Burning Dusk Cult. “The butcher with my blade.”

Burning Dusk fell above our heads, and Dymas cut Polyzalus’ sunset domain in half.

1.127

The Son of Rome

The melee grew more chaotic the further down the mountain we went. The junior estates for the youngest and least of the Raging Heaven’s mystikos came and went, and soon enough I saw that it was more than just my own shaky coalition at war on this mountain. I had hoped otherwise, but deep in my gut I’d known. The initiates of the Howling Wind, Broken Tide, Waning Wax, and Scattered Foam had made it furthest up the mountain, but they were not alone.

I sprinted through the fork that joined our winding path to the primary steps, those that led straight down to the Raging Heaven’s grand entry gates, and I saw a grim cacophony of refined violence spilling all the way down the mountain.

Hundreds upon hundreds of cultivators from all over the free world spat and shouted and raged against one another in countless personal vendettas, acting for all the world as if every single one of them was center stage and all the rest of the mountain their audience. I saw flashing blades forged from iron and bronze, some studded with gems and others inlaid with glimmering veins in the style of the mountain’s tribulation amethyst.

I saw cult techniques spring forth in the dozens with every passing moment, manifested virtues like crashing waves and gale winds that raged without regard for bystanders. I saw men and women washed away and buried beneath their fellow initiates. In other places I saw them crushed and burned and blinded - some all at the same time. The brawl unfurled beneath us like a scroll, and every petty feud I saw was a word written in Raging Heaven’s blood - each one burning sullen as a brand.

For every sword that cut its intended target, there was another that strayed into a nearby brawl. An unnoticed initiate run through by mistake, a sure blow knocked aside by another cultivator’s strike, and on and on it went. In some places, even apparent allies in the same cult attire clashed like raging bulls.

It was a sickening sight, and at the same time it made my palms itch in anticipation. The Roman portion of my soul was at odds with the Greek portion, as was usually the case. I could almost feel it, ridiculous as the thought seemed.

Griffon, for his part, was entirely in his element. His pankration hands were a blur of scarlet light around him as he ran down the mountain path, catching and redirecting and casting aside whatever stray techniques and weapons came his way. The further we descended the worse the fighting got, yet his good mood had only grown.

“I still don’t like it.” His words were damning, but his eyes remained bright. “If everything goes exactly as you want it to, you’ll have only bought them time. The tree has nine roots - one of them is dead and the other eight are rotten. It doesn’t need tending. It needs uprooting.”

“Maybe so. But are we strong enough to uproot it?”

Griffon leapt into the air and spun, dodging a volley of shimmering bronze arrows that thrummed with vicious energy. He struck the archer responsible, a junior philosopher from the Brazen Aegis, with a roundhouse kick to the side of the head. The woman was unconscious before she hit the ground.

“Not yet,” he conceded. “I still don’t like it. It’s naive.”

“It’s a solution. Nothing is perfect.”

“Wrong.” Griffon’s pneuma flared vibrantly, more so than it had been a moment ago and less so than it would be a moment from now. His eyes remained locked on the path ahead of us, but I could tell his mind was back up in the storm crown.

“Nothing down here is perfect,” I amended.

For a long moment Griffon said nothing at all. Then I saw it from the corner of my eye. That ruinous smile.

“Not yet.”

We made it over halfway down the mountain before we caught the eye of someone we couldn’t just run through. Given the state of the mountain and our relative weakness, we’d been fortunate to make it that far at all. After the months we’d spent drawing ire from everyone we could, it was all but inevitable we’d hit such a wall.

He was a stout man in silks the color of rust and dried blood, and his fellow initiates all but flung themselves out of his path as he raced up the mountain to meet us. His stony expression was a foreboding contrast to the screaming fury of his pneuma. He was a captain of the Sophic Realm, and his hoplon shield was covered in blood.

Griffon noticed the approaching cultivator at the same moment I did. He took the man’s measure in an instant and found him wanting, shouting a challenge and leaping down to meet him.

Together, we might have been able to beat him. With Prometheus’ golden blood coursing through me, I felt like I could beat anyone on that mountain. Even if I couldn’t, I had half a mind to try.

Fortunately, it was only half a mind.

Griffon trusted me to watch his flank while he engaged, and so he was entirely unprepared for me to pivot and tackle him off the mountain path before he could engage with the captain from the Infernal Frenzy Cult. Griffon shouted in outrage, our pursuer moved to capitalize on our distraction, and I finished drawing the raven’s mantle over my head.

I stepped into the shadow of a mountain grotto and left the sophic captain to his carnage.

—

The tempered mantle of the raven did more than just unsettle those who looked upon it. Prior to our trip to Thracia, our black rags had only resembled shadows. Likewise, our ability to step through shadows had been little more than a trick of the light. It was camouflage - exceptionally good camouflage, but in the end only that.

Thracia had changed that. Stepping through the shadows of the Orphic House had been an eye opening experience in more ways than one. Among the many things I’d taken with me from that place, this was one of the most useful.

Griffon and I moved like ghosts through the shadows of Kaukoso Mons. So long as we stayed immersed we were utterly undetectable, even to the other crows we found skulking around in search of easy targets. It forced us to move slower, more methodically, but not agonizingly so.

The shadows of the men and women brawling on the mountain were closed off to us for reasons I couldn’t explain, but in the burning light of dusk we had more than enough mountain crags and grottos to make our way down unbothered.

We were nearly there when Griffon spoke up, scaring the ragged assassin we were creeping by half to death in the process.

“A problem remains.”

I seized the crow and clamped my hand over their mouth before they could scream. I rifled through their rags with my other hand in search of weapons, and it was then I discovered another boon the raven’s tempered mantle had afforded me. Before, Griffon and I had been forced to wait for our captive’s ink-black essence to reveal itself of its own accord.

Now, my hand closed around a bird’s delicate frame and drew it from the assassin’s rags. The man I was holding spasmed, and the ink-black construct of pneuma began to shriek as soon as I pulled it free.

I crushed the crow’s skull with my teeth and tore its head free, chewing methodically. My nose wrinkled. How could Sorea stand this taste?

“I’m listening,” I said, offering Griffon the rest of the crow construct and tossing the assassin out of the shadows. He fell in a heap among a group of senior philosophers that were cutting each other to bloody shreds with nothing more than vicious rhetoric, and after a startled beat the sophists turned away from one another and swarmed the ragged crow.

“This venture relies entirely on Polyzalus’ love for his wife,” Griffon said after he’d swallowed down his share. “It relies on the nectar.”

I looked sharply at him. After all we’d just seen? “You think the brew is bad?”

“No. I think it’s exactly what it was intended to be.”

Ah. “You think Socrates lied to Selene?”

“I think some things are worth seeing for ourselves.”

I grimaced. Even if the nectar we’d brewed was pure, who was to say it would actually heal the Oracle? It was a fair concern. One we could test.

“Fine,” I said, resigned. “We’ll decide it with dice. Loser gets stabbed and takes a sip from the cup.”

Griffon chuckled and abruptly changed course, bounding through the shadows towards a nearby marble building.

“I have a better idea.”

We emerged from the shadows in the middle of a triage under siege. This had been a physician’s ordered domain once, I could tell, but it had been swept up in the day’s chaos as surely as the rest of the cult. Every upright cot and bed was occupied, some of them with two or three injured cultivators occupying them depending on size. Nearly as many of the cots had been knocked over in the chaos, though, spilling their patients out onto the bloodied marble floors.

From the split second of screaming I heard before we revealed ourselves, I gathered the gist of things - the physicians had taken in as many wounded as they could when the brawl first began, but they’d rapidly run out of space and materials and tried to lock the place down. The assailants that had forced their way in were a mix of cultivators both genuine and dishonest. Some of them were fighting for what remained of the medical supplies so they could help their downed friends. Others were aiming to exploit the chaos and cut down their bed-ridden rivals.

All of them, physicians and patients and assailants alike, froze like frightened deer when Griffon and I stepped out of the shadows cast by a privacy curtain in the center of the triage. It only lasted a second.

Griffon and I made full use of that time. Twenty-nine scarlet hands exploded from Griffon’s soul and flooded the triage unit with their light. I drew my bronze spear from the raven’s cloak and drew it back like it was a javelin, pointing a damning finger at a kind-looking woman whose eyes had been manically locked on an unconscious patient before we’d unveiled ourselves. She dropped the short blade she’d been holding in both hands and I pivoted, flinging the spear as hard as I could at another cultivator that had a physician pinned to the bloody marble.

The man lunged to the side and my spear took him through the left shoulder and nailed him to the column ten feet behind where he’d been.

Griffon stalked up and down the rows of patients while I cleared out the rest of the invaders. His pankration hands darted around the room, some of them assisting with the expulsion but most of them falling upon the patients and wounded doctors. A few of them flinched and screamed, a few more tried to fling themselves from their beds to get away from him, but he would not be denied. One by one he took them in his hands, and one by one their protests went quiet after only a few moments.

When the last of the assailants had been banished from the healing house, I turned and beheld a miracle in motion.

Griffon stood over the bed of a crumpled woman while the rest of his hands flooded the triage with healing light. Bruises were smoothed away like they were smudges of mud, minor cuts were mended in an instant and more serious gauges were sewed shut by deft hands of corporeal pneuma. Other injuries that couldn’t be seen by an external eye were nonetheless mended, patients suddenly breathing easier with scarlet limbs pressed to their chests, color returning to gaunt faces as if he’d siphoned the rosy light of dawn from his soul and into their flesh.

“You again,” croaked the physician I’d seen pinned to the floor. He forced himself up shakily. His nose was broken and the wraps around his hands and arms were soaked through with blood to the point that the indigo and the gold fabric were almost indistinguishable from one another. He glared at Griffon. “Was this your doing?”

“Was what my doing?” Griffon poked and prodded the woman he was standing over with his own flesh and blood hands. She didn’t protest, only stared up at the ceiling in bleak despair.

“This. All of this!” the stout physician shouted. He tried to wave a hand at the state of the triage pavilion and abruptly collapsed back to the floor, unable to support his weight on just one arm. “I’ve heard the stories about you and your-” his eyes flickered to me and he faltered.

“You think we caused this?” Griffon asked mildly without looking back. “You think two men are to blame for the Raging Heaven Cult’s sorry state? You think we had a hand in this madness?”

Each question beat the physician further down, until he was forced to turn his eyes away. I expected Griffon to leave it at that.

Instead, he hummed. “You might be right.”

Griffon held out a hand to me. I passed him the golden cup of nectar, and every conscious soul in the triage watched intently as he tilted the woman’s chin up.

“Harmodius of the Howling Wind Cult,” Griffon named her, and I abruptly recognized her pneuma. I’d felt it in the instant that her crow construct had abandoned her, an instant after I had flung her off the side of Kaukoso Mons so many weeks ago. “I’ve come to make good on my promise.”

“What?” the bed-ridden woman rasped.

“I lack the knowledge to mend you with surgery, and I’ve run out of time to learn.” Griffon tilted the golden cup ever so slightly, just enough for a thin stream to spill over the lip and trail down the contour of the cup. It gathered at the bottom in a single drop.

“Nectar will have to suffice.”

Harmodius gasped and the drop fell into her open mouth.

The effect was immediate.

Harmodious inhaled sharply and every curtain in the healing house flapped and billowed towards her. Bloodied sheets flew through the air and the overturned cots without occupants to hold them down skittered across the marble towards the woman. It was as if she was sucking all the air on the mountain into her lungs, drawing vitality from it and filling herself to the brim. Her pneuma rose up around her and sharpened in my senses, gaining clarity and depth that it hadn’t had before.

Her eyes, having rolled up into the back of her head as soon as the drop touched her tongue, abruptly snapped to Griffon’s hooded face. When the former crow spoke, the rasp was gone and in its place a melodious wonder.

“What did you-?”

Griffon gripped her cot and flipped it.

The physicians scattered around the pavilion cried out, the one that had accused Griffon moments ago the loudest of them all. A moment later, their protests died in their throats.

Harmodius stared down at her legs, baffled. She’d twisted and landed in a crouch with a cultivator’s usual thoughtless grace. She blinked rapidly, tears springing to her eyes.

“There,” Griffon spoke, and his satisfaction was deeper than the sea.

—

In benevolence, or perhaps in spite, Bakkhos had given each of his Elder Tyrant’s a portion of Kaukoso Mons to rule as they saw fit. Each branch estate was theirs to shape as they saw fit, each one a safe haven wherein their word was heavenly law. It was no surprise, then, that each of their estates had been built in the image of their lost domains.

I’d never seen the Howling Wind Cult’s floating city with my own eyes, nor had I sailed through the Waning Wax Cult’s Alabaster Isles or paid my respects to the city that had made my master who he was. However, I had been to Egypt, and I had been to the ruined cities of the Conqueror in Macedonia, and I had seen both of their marks in the hollow domain of the Scattered Foam Cult’s Elder. I was confident that if and when I did visit the cities that the other Elders had been taken from, I’d see the same resemblance.

When Griffon and I stepped out of the shadows just outside the Burning Dusk’s portion of the mountain, it was like being dropped back into the Scarlet City.

Polyzalus’ sunset domain was a sprawling complex of estates with shingled roofs of baked red clay, laid out in such a way that they caught the light of the falling sun and seemed to catch fire - no, they were on fire. The rooftops burned, the flames giving off no smoke and spreading no further than the clay shingles themselves. Beyond that, I saw the hallmarks of the colony city’s culture carved into stone reliefs, stitched into proud banners and flying flags, and brought to life in the form of lush plant life that I had not seen anywhere else since fleeing Alikos.

“HALT.”

The resemblance was clearest of all in the guards that barred the gates. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and heard the distant howling of wolves as my eyes traced over their bronze armor and the red-feather plumes that jutted up proudly from their helmets. For a moment I was back on that battlefield, shackled and surrounded by the corpses of my men.

It passed.

“Identify yourselves! Now!” One of the men snapped, the one standing in the center of the shield wall barring the gates.

I peeled the raven’s mantle off and cast it back into my shadow. Griffon followed suit beside me.

“My name is Sol, and this is Griffon,” I said, advancing forward towards the shield wall. The soldiers of the Burning Dusk Cult tensed and leveled their spears at me through the gaps. Their formation was cohesive enough, I’d give them that.

“Where did you come from?” The soldier in charge demanded. His narrow eyes flickered between Griffon and I, lingering on Griffon’s pristine cult attire.

“The Rosy Dawn,” I answered. I watched it ripple through their ranks, saw their shock and the confusion.

“Why?” One of them blurted while the lead soldier was still formulating a response.

Griffon laid one hand on the pommel of his stolen blade and laid his other arm across my shoulders. His scarlet eyes glowed, a perfect match to the burning rooftops overhead.

“We’ve come to see the Oracle.”

The collective vitality of the shieldwall reared up like a serpent, outrage and contempt darkening every soldier’s face. The man in charge bared his teeth and slammed his shield back against his breastplate, a challenge that every soldier in the line mimicked. The sound was thunderous, drowning out the distant noise of chaos and fighting.

It was the first time we’d encountered initiates of the Burning Dusk - outside of crows - since arriving in Olympia. Somehow, despite everything I’d learned about the enmity between the two sister cults, their reaction still surprised me. I’d intended to use the Raven’s reputation to sway whatever resistance we encountered, but this… This was a problem.

Just before I made a decision I’d have almost certainly regretted, pneuma like volcanic winds subsumed us all. Griffon and I, and every soldier in the shield wall.

“Is that so?”

Up above our heads, reclining on a burning rooftop as comfortably as he would a feather bed, a Hero sat. I hadn’t felt his arrival or seen him appear, hadn’t noticed him at all until he’d spoken. His burning eyes regarded Griffon and I with amused expectation.

“Give your men a break, captain,” he said, though his eyes never left Griffon and I. “I’ll handle these two.”

The central soldier whipped his head around like he’d been slapped, staring up in disbelief at the Hero. “Butcher, what are you-!?”

The soldier’s blood-orange cloak abruptly caught flame, and he snarled a curse while his fellow soldiers leapt away from him in alarm.

“Off you go,” the Hero drawled, shooing them away. Some of the soldiers took the legendary cultivator’s order for what it was and marched double time back into their complex. The man that had been in charge of the gates only moments ago threw his burning cloak to the ground and glared murderously up at the Hero he’d called Butcher.

“We aren’t your men,” he seethed. “The kyrios will hear of this, I promise you that!”

For the first time since his arrival, the Hero turned his burning gaze away from Griffon and I. He cocked an eyebrow at the soldier.

“Who do you think sent me?”

That was enough to convince the rest of them. Griffon’s arm tightened around my shoulder as they drew back and retreated, his knuckles white around the hilt of his blade. I held my own spear at the ready, but there was something…

The Hero landed adroitly in the center of the gateway, glory rolling off of him in waves. He was taller than both of us, not to the scale of a Tyrant or even Orpheus, but taller than any man had a right to be. He had a sword belted to his hip and a well-worn traveler’s cloak hung comfortably across his broad shoulders. His breastplate and his greaves were pristine, shining brass.

He considered us both, his lips quirking up. Then he took a deliberate step forward, stepping outside of Polyzalus’ sunset domain and bringing us within reach of his blade.

“Let’s talk candidly, boys.”

1.126 (part 1?)

The Son of Rome

“GO!” the Titan roared, as the phoenix of the caucuses savaged him with its talons-

“SEEK SAFER SHORES,” the Titan commanded, as the legions of Rome fell screaming up into the sky.

We raced down the mountain without a moment’s pause for the Storm That Never Ceased. Our steps were bounding, our energy overflowing. The tribulation hounds that pursued us in our descent were met with Griffon’s lightning limbs and the tip of my celestial spear. Our momentum was unstoppable, as much within as it was without. The Titan Flame’s golden ichor burned in my stomach, warming me to the tips of my fingers and toes and growing warmer every second.

My every step crushed the loose stones on Kaukoso Mons and caused the nearby veins of amethyst to flare indigo-bright, but in spite of that my heart felt lighter than it had in years. The weight on my shoulders was heavier than it had ever been, but I no longer doubted my ability to bear it up.

“STAND READY WHEN THE CAPTAIN CALLS.”

It was one thing to see the truth of something with your own eyes, to live through that experience for good and for ill. No matter how harrowing a thing might be, no matter how cruel or improbable, it was human nature to trust what your eyes told you if nothing else at all.

The secondhand conveyance of that lived experience was another thing entirely. No matter what the Greeks claimed, theirs was not the only way to cultivate - and further, it was not a perfect way forward. Even my mentor, one of their greatest thinkers, had acknowledged that much. Some things had to be seen firsthand. Some things could not be taken on faith alone.

When the imposter wearing Anastasia’s face had presented me with her living memory of Caesar’s Edict, my desire to believe her had been desperate. But some things were too outlandish to be taken on faith. I had never heard of a philosopher using their rhetoric to convey a lie of lived experience, but neither had I seen a titan of lightning wrath appear above my own legion as I had the men in her memory.

I had seen staggering wonders and horrors both during my time afield, but never had my eyes seen anything like that. I still didn’t fully trust the mad visions I had seen in the Orphic house. How, then, could I trust the story of an imposter?

The woman wearing Anastasia’s face had struck me with her memory like a club and vanished into the night before I could regain my senses. Then, tragedy of tragedies, Socrates had returned and declared the nectar spoiled.

I had wanted to believe in the truth of her lived experience. I had desired it so desperately that I could have spit blood. But I wasn’t that foolish anymore.

Then I’d laid eyes on the Titan Flame, and realized I knew even less of this world than I’d thought.

“KNOW THAT GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR'S WILL HAS CAST YOU OUT."

There were calamities in this world that I had never even imagined beyond the boundaries of night fire stories. Buried beneath the earth and chained to unseen mountain peaks were answers to questions I had forgotten how to ask. I had been arrogant. I had dismissed the imposter’s memory not in spite of my desires, but because of them. I had grown so used to having no hope at all that its sudden arrival had felt like thrusting my frost-bitten heart into a roaring flame.

Who was I to doubt the General of the West, to question what he had been capable of in his final moments? Compared to what I had seen inside the Storm That Never Ceased, what was so impossible about Caesar’s final act? How could his Edict be any more outlandish than the enemy that had necessitated it - the legions of unnatural demons that I had seen with my own eyes? Killed with my own hands?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Griffon’s joy was dazzling as we burst out of the storm crown and inhaled the open air. I couldn’t have stifled my own smile if I’d tried.

I had been aimless the day I set foot in the city of Olympia. The wisdom of an old mentor had been the only thing left for me to cling to, along with the cold comfort of my resolve. I had arrived seeking a spark to light my own pyre, and what I’d found instead was something infinitely greater.

I had found hope.

Seek safer shores.

My city had fallen, but Rome was more than concrete and winding roads. I had failed Caesar, failed my legion, but the war was not yet over. I was not all that remained. It could no longer be enough for me to share a funeral flame with Carthage’s dogs, not when I was needed elsewhere.

Seek safer shores.

The legions of Rome were lost. Caesar’s hand had cast them out and only the General of the West knew where they’d been sent. Hundreds of thousands of Roman soldiers and provincial citizens of the Republic, gone as if they’d never been. They were lost.

But I could find them.

SEEK SAFER SHORES.

And I would. I would cover every coast on this earth with the print of my boot if that was what needed to be done.

We kept on running without pause, racing down the craggy mountain path towards the invisible line that turned Tyrant eyes away. Griffon caught my eye and clenched the fist he’d marked with Herakles’ blade.

“Enough of barking dogs,” he reminded me. As if I’d forget. I raised my own clenched fist and knocked it against his.

“Enough of higher powers.”

I’d do whatever it took to bring Roma’s lost legions home.

And when the work was done, it would be my own hands that nailed their traitorous generals to the cross.

—

It had been early morning when we first set foot inside the storm crown, the rosy dawn a bright promise of the coming day. When Griffon and I came charging out we found the celestial glory descending swiftly into burning dusk. The final day before the month of mandatory training for the Olympic Games was nearly at its end.

In our absence, the Raging Heaven Cult had fallen into madness.

We raced down stone-carved steps ten at a time and very quickly found ourselves enveloped in a chaos I’d seen the likes of only once before. Only on the first day of the Rosy Dawn’s initiation rites had I seen such an undisciplined mass of cultivators laying into each other like this. The difference here and now was the scale of it all.

The brawling crowds and spirited games that had spilled across the Scarlet City’s eastern mountain range during the rites had been composed primarily of civic cultivators, and low ranking ones at that. They had all been of the Rosy Dawn, and though I hadn’t taken the time to count them all back then, I was confident their sum total hadn’t surpassed a thousand.

The Rosy Dawn was in some ways only half a cult, and doubly limited in its scope by its colonial status. The Raging Heaven Cult, by contrast, was the largest institution of its kind. The baseline for its mystikos stood an entire realm above the Rosy Dawn, and there were thousands of them. More importantly than either of those facts, though, was what the Raging Heaven lacked in comparison to Griffon’s humble colony cult.

Even the chaos of the Rosy Dawn’s initiation rites had been carefully controlled by the unseen hand of Damon Aetos. The Raging Heaven, by contrast, had lacked a clear leader since Bakkhos’ death. Its internal factions had been left to stew in that uncertainty for months, jumping at every shadow and eyeing every faction outside their own. All of them waiting for the bones to drop, and all of them dreading their new place in the mountain’s hierarchy when they settled.

I didn’t know whose hand it had been to cast the dice, but it was plain to see that they’d been cast. Men and women in torn silks and dangling sleeves of blue, yellow, fuschia, and grass green abounded near the peak. Though there were others caught in the press, most notably the native members of the Raging Heaven with no affiliation to other cults, the vast majority were from the factions I had dealt with since returning from Thracia.

Some of them recognized my face as we sprinted down the steps. A mid-ranking Sophic cultivator from the Howling Wind Cult lurched away from the woman he’d been beating bloody and called out frantically to me as we passed. Whatever he said was lost in the dull roar of the hundreds waging crude war all around us, and when he tried to pursue us his opponent took the opportunity to leap onto his back and dig her nails into his eyes.

He was far from the only one to call out to us, but we didn’t slow down for any of them. Our momentum was only growing more unstoppable the more of the mayhem our eyes beheld. The Titan’s golden ichor was only growing brighter within me, cycling faster and hotter every time my heart beat.

We ran, avoiding what could be avoided and brushing aside what could not with pankration intent and limbs made heavy by the weight of better men. The enormity of it, the aimless violence - there were children in the mix. They were young prodigies with potential far beyond their peers, but it did them little good when adults twice their size broke their teeth against the stone steps. Everywhere I looked I saw the mad injustice of Greece on proud display.

No. This went beyond the worst of Greek culture. This aimless, staggering violence was a cultivator’s sin first and foremost.

Griffon and I broke up the worst of what we saw, but only what we could reach without breaking stride. A brawl on this scale was beyond either of our abilities to stop. We lacked the power. More importantly, we lacked the time.

[Seek safer shores.]

Whatever came of this, a portion of it would be on my head. Even so, I wouldn’t waste another day on this mountain.

Fortunately, there were forces on this mountain that could raise their hand against this chaos and snuff it like a candle. That one of them hadn’t already stepped in told me the stalemate between the Raging Heaven’s Elders was still holding strong.

That changed tonight.

“Say this works,” Griffon called out to me in the voice of his soul, the words carrying easily through the equally soundless cacophony of weaponized rhetoric. “Assume that Old ‘Zalus lets us in to see his wife at all, and take it on faith that he loves her enough that curing her wins his favor. What then?”

Two young men in ragged Waning Wax attire appeared in my path, both of them near the peak of the Sophic Realm. They each shouted a warning, and at the same time they struck out at me with the strength of learned truths. I lowered my shoulder and stepped through their influence, and then I stepped through them. They were both flung back in different directions, bonelessly, as if they’d been struck by a charging bull.

“He puts a stop to whatever this is,” I answered Griffon.

“And when all seven of his peers strike him down for stepping out of his gilded cage?”

“Not seven. Three. The other four are on my side. With ‘Zalus, we’ll have the majority. They won’t start a fight they have any chance of losing, not if they can avoid it.”

Griffon vaulted over a man and a woman that were kicking seven shades of shit out of a boy his cousin’s age, and as he passed his pankration hands gripped each of their heads and slammed them together. He cocked a golden eyebrow at me while the two fell into a limp heap behind us.

“They’re only ‘on your side’ because they hate Zalus more than they revile you. What makes you think they’ll stand with him? What makes you think he’ll stand with them?”

“Experience.”

Griffon barked a laugh.

“And after that? Once the dust has settled and we’ve returned to where we started, what do we do about the question of the crown? Even a city like Olympia isn’t large enough for five men to rule it.”

“It’s larger than that. The indigo throne is large enough to seat eight.”

“Ho?” Scarlet eyes glittered with anticipation.

Caesar’s Edict had changed everything, and at the same time it had changed nothing at all. My current purpose had no impact on the actions I’d taken as a raven among crows. The consequences remained the same, and here and now they were spilling over like blood on Kaukoso Mons. Indirectly or not, I could see my hand in this mayhem.

If it was a choice between my conscience and the people of Rome, I’d suffer the sleepless nights without a second thought. Thankfully, this situation wasn’t quite that binary. There was work here that I could do before I set sail for safer shores.

I couldn’t replace Bakkhos, but that was fine. A city could survive without a king. Even better, it could thrive. Left to their own devices, the Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult would sooner drink liquid lead than embrace their fellow Elders in alliance. However. My time as the Raven had proven they could be persuaded. My unlikely coalition, threadbare as it may have been, was proof enough that they could play the game if pressed.

A greater theater could force them all to stand together, if only for a time. Unfortunately for the Raging Heaven’s venerable Elders, and fortunately for everyone else in Olympia, that greater threat would be here in a month. What better enemy to bring them all together than the upstart kyrioi that had taken their old thrones?

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but the best ones never were. It would have to be enough.

Though the words were silent to my ears, the voice of my soul resounded with the pride I felt for my once great city - my still great city.

“In Rome, we called them the Triumvirate.”

1.125 [Nikolas Aetos]

The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Somehow, even now, the image that appeared when Niko called to mind his cousins was a single night from years ago. The night they’d carved their refuge out of the eastern mountain range had been a warm one, the full moon and its chorus of stars burning bright over their heads.

It was Niko that did the bulk of the work, though Lio carved out more than his fair share and the rest of them chipped away as much as they could. When all was said and done they had a cavern of their own making, just large enough to fit the seven of them and a low burning fire. He remembered the exhausted satisfaction on each of their faces, their expressions glowing in that first fire’s light.

They had told each other stories - grand tragicomedies that they’d all heard before but never tired of retelling, stories of lessons they’d learned from their mentors within the Rosy Dawn Cult, and eventually, mundane stories of their time apart from each other.

He remembered Lio’s excitement that night, carefully controlled to the point that Niko was the only one that noticed it, and he remembered how his cousin’s scarlet eyes had shone when it was his time to speak. He hadn’t wasted a moment on preamble.

“Today, I did this.”

And to the astonishment of all of his cousins, the Young Aristocrat had drawn upon his pneuma and in an instant shaped it to his will. Six rosy hands had appeared in the smoke above the night fire, each one distinct from his own flesh and blood limbs.

Niko had been approaching the peak of the Sophic Realm at that point, but he’d been every bit as shocked as their younger cousins. More so, perhaps, because he’d been learned enough to fully appreciate the Young Aristocrat’s feat.

It was impressive enough that he’d been able to manifest anything at his age and level of refinement, but then Niko had achieved much the same in his own time as a Civic cultivator. No, what made it exceptional was what he had manifested. Not a sword of his intent, as Niko and so many others favored. Not a hammer or an axe or even a spear. He’d manifested hands.

Their younger cousins hadn’t understood how incredible that was then. Niko wouldn’t be surprised if they still didn’t fully grasp it today. The issue with manifesting intent, and the reason why every cultivator under the sun didn’t go around plucking whatever tool or weapon they happened to need from thin air, was because it required more than just control. For a cultivator to project Sword Intent, to shape their vital breath and condense it into a corporeal blade, they had to understand just what it was they were creating - and to what end.

Swordsmithing was an art as much as it was a craft, and Niko had seen for himself the wondrous little complexities that went into the creation of a quality blade. That being said, a sword was simple. A blade was even more so. Swords, daggers, hammers and axes and spears, the most commonly seen manifestations of refined intent, were common because of their simplicity. The more complex the working, the more difficult it was to manifest. Adding a hilt to a naked blade and making a sword of it, for example, made the venture twice as difficult.

There were twenty-seven bones in a human hand alone. Each one connected by joints and ligaments, strips of muscles and flesh functioning in staggering synchronicity. Manifesting just one would have been an outrageous feat.

Watching little Lio manipulate six hands of his intent as naturally as he would his own, striking at the rising smoke with clenched fists and snatching grapple motions, Niko hadn’t said a word. Yet despite that, regardless of the fact that he was silent while Myron and Heron whooped and tried to catch the floating hands, while Castor clapped and Rena cried out in wonder, and while little Lydia laughed in pure joy for her favorite cousin - in spite of all that, Niko knew he was by far the one most impressed by the accomplishment.

Lio had known it, too. He’d tried to smirk when they locked eyes across the fire, but a child prodigy was still a child in the end. When he’d seen Niko’s honest wonder, the smirk had given way to a toothy smile. His eyes had burned with satisfaction, with pride, and with renewed determination.

That was the image of his cousins that Niko kept closest in his heart. When he told stories of them it was the rosy glow of that night fire lighting up his mind’s eye. When he missed them it was their laughter and their joy that he recalled. When he thought of the Young Aristocrat, it was Lio’s smile winning out. Satisfaction overturning arrogance.

Nikolas Aetos had spent his years abroad flourishing and changing as a man, growing into his own and making his mark on the world outside his uncle’s island. Fool that he was, he’d decided somewhere along the way that he was the only one changing. He’d come home expecting to see those very same faces gathered around the fire. Older, to be sure, some of them closer to adults than children, but unchanged in all the ways that mattered.

Prodigy of prodigies they called him. Yet no matter how many times he was proven wrong, he just couldn’t make this lesson stick. What kind of prodigy couldn’t recognize what was right in front of his face? What sort of man didn’t take the time to know his own family?

No man at all.

Niko stood in the knee-high water of a pavilion fountain that had been scattered rubble just a few moments before, as distantly aware of his wife’s grip on his arm as he was the mayhem on the mountain, and stared blankly at a stranger wearing his little cousin’s face.

“My fault? My fault!?” Heron raged, still breathless and soaking wet from his dash into the Ionian. “You gave him free reign for months! You let him skip his lessons, turned away while he ran wild in the gymnasium, indulged him while he did anything and everything he wanted, and yet it’s my fault-”

“He’s your brother!” Stavros Aetos shouted, blue eyes blazing as he strained against the courtyard’s stone guardians that were holding him in place. The stone statues of past Heroes were unmoved, bolstered by a far greater force standing silent nearby. “Your younger brother. You should have taken action!”

“Months.” Heron stalked up and down the perimeter of the fountain, fists clenching and unclenching impotently. “You let him retrace all of Lio’s steps for months, and now you act like he’s been stolen. As if this could have gone any other way.”

He was nearly a man himself now, sixteen years old, and had grown half a hand taller just in the months that Niko had been home. He took after his father - and Uncle Fotios by proxy - more visibly every day. He’d grown into his frame, his Rosy Dawn silks clinging to him where they’d hung free before. He’d shed the boyhood fat in his cheeks to reveal a strong jaw that changed his demeanor entirely. His brow, too. He’d always had a heavy brow, but it was more pronounced these days. Or perhaps he simply glowered more.

Niko looked closer, searching for that boy who had regarded Lio’s rosy hands of dawn with such wonder. The young Heron that had looked up to Niko and Lio with unmarred admiration throughout their upbringing.

Niko’s eyes were sharper now than they’d ever been before. How was it, then, that he couldn’t see the faintest hint of that boy in his cousin’s face?

“He’s only ten years old, Heron.” Aunt Raisa’s burning eyes were pinched, her voice shaky with fear for her younger son and rage against the stone statues that held her back from sprinting into the sea. Still, she mastered herself as best she could. “If your eyes saw what ours couldn’t, why didn’t you say something?”

Heron gnashed his teeth and looked away, and for the first time since they’d emerged from the heart of the mountain, Niko locked eyes with his younger cousin. The accusation in his eyes made Niko’s stomach clench.

“What was I supposed to say?” Heron finally said, turning back to his parents. “My younger brother by six years has surpassed me in cultivation, flown by as if he had wings, and you haven’t looked at me the same way since.”

“That’s not-” Raisa began. Stavros didn’t let her finish.

“This isn’t about you.”

“What could I have said?” Heron snapped. “Tell me the words that would have convinced you I was concerned for my brother and not resentful of his climb! Show me the action I should have taken against a child two ranks above me - too stubborn to listen and too quick for me to catch. Should I have wrapped him up in his sheets while he was sleeping? Beaten him ‘til he saw sense?”

“Heron!”

“What? That’s the way, isn’t it-”

“Enough,” spoke the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn, and it was like a spell had been broken. Niko blinked, perplexed, and tore his eyes away from his cousin to take in the state of the pavilion.

He saw that Uncle Fotios and Aunt Chryse hadn’t moved from the spot they’d been in when they received the news about Lydia. Uncle Damon had stopped them himself, gripping them each by the shoulder and forcing them to their knees in the ruined pool. Though the water bubbled and steamed beneath them, nothing else came of their wrath. The kyrios had smothered the worst of it at once.

Niko carefully pried Iphys’ fingers away from his arm, one at a time, and clasped their hands together instead. Glancing back, he saw that the rest of their companions were still with them, though they all looked like they’d rather have been anywhere else.

Iphys and their companions were proud Heroic souls in their own rights, but the twin eagles and their wives were Captains of the Heroic Realm. They’d spent weeks down in the mountain training and breaking bread together, sharing stories in the quiet moments that lingered between cultivation. Niko’s companions had grown comfortable with them, as he’d hoped they would, but perhaps too much so in the end. His wife and his friends had forgotten what his family was.

Their anger had reminded them.

“You knew,” Fotios spoke, glaring up at his eldest brother. Damon stared down at him, expression level. “You knew that this would happen-”

“Could happen.”

“You knew,” Lydia’s father spat just past the kyrio’s scarlet robes. The spittle hissed and turned to steam as soon as it touched the fountain pool. “And you did nothing to stop it. You didn’t leave a single worthy eye to watch over them. Our children, Damon.”

The kyrios’ hands were full, so he gestured with his gaze instead. His blue eyes speared through a man dressed in charred silks, one of over a dozen sophic cultivators that were kneeling in the boiling waters at the edge of the fountain. The man in question was already pale faced with pain and trepidation. When Damon Aetos’ attention fell upon him, the sophist thrust his hands down into the boiling water to hide their sudden trembling.

“I left behind wise men to mind things in our absence, as I’ve always done.”

“You left behind the dregs,” Stavros bit out in a dark voice that promised violence. “You left nothing but the scraps that weren’t worth casting out. You left our children unattended, and my son is gone because of it!”

“Let us go, brother,” Raisa urged him, wrenching her arms against the stone sentinels holding her back. Her vibrant blonde hair hung down over her eyes, her heart’s flame shining through the curtain. “Whatever this is, they’ve no part in it. Let us bring them home.”

“Be reasonable, Damon,” Chryse murmured. She didn’t raise her head, staring down at her own reflection in the pool where she knelt. “They’re just children.”

The kyrios considered them both.

“So were we.”

The twin eagles sagged, Stavros hanging limp in the sentinels’ stone arms while Fotios’ shoulders bowed beneath an unseen weight. Their wives turned to them, helpless, but Niko’s uncles had nothing more to say. Chryse whispered a curse. Raisa began to sob.

“Nephew,” the kyrios spoke, and though Heron snapped to attention Niko knew their uncle was talking to him. “Go and fetch your cousins for me.”

Ah, right. Rena was down at the docks, in tears just like her mother, and Castor was hounding the sophists that had watched his sister go. Rena and Castor. He’d seen them both countless times since his return. How strange that the only image in his mind was their delighted applause, the night fire glow and the light of Lio’s hands dancing in their eyes.

“Niko.”

The voices of four of his companions hissed his name, and Iphys gripped his hand tight enough to snap an iron bar. Urgent.

“We don’t have time,” she whispered in his ear. She was right, of course. They’d waited long enough, and all on his behalf. He’d taken months from them - he wouldn’t take another. Especially not this one.

“The Games are in a month, uncle,” he said firmly. He stepped forward, away from his wife and his companions and over the lip of the fountain. The boiling water would have been an agony to the philosophers currently kneeling in wait for his uncle’s judgment, but to Niko it was as bath water.

“If we’re not in Olympia by sundown tonight we won’t be able to compete.” He squared his shoulders and faced the kyrios squarely. “My friends came here to see me wed. They came because I asked them - because I wanted them to meet the man that raised me.” Niko inclined his head in deference to his uncle, and then he threw everything to the wind.

“I didn’t bring them here in chains, uncle. These people aren’t yours to keep.”

There came gasps, along with a flurry of half-spoken warnings and exclamations from all around the pavilion. Uncle Fotios and Aunt Chryse both twisted to look up at him in alarm, still trapped by the kyrios’ hand on each of their shoulders. Niko ignored it all and forced himself to match Damon Aetos piercing stare. To stand tall and unshaken.

Like his father would have done.

“Your friends are guests in my domain,” the kyrios finally said. “They’re free to leave at any time.”

Niko stared at him steadily. Unspoken went his response: Not without me.

Damon’s lips curled.

“Fetch your cousins for me, Nikolas,” he told him again, sky blue eyes just a bit more fond. “After that you’re free to go.”

Ah.

—

The Sand Reckoner’s workshop was the same as it always was.

“I need a ship,” Niko declared, catching a hysterical young woman as she stumbled away from a lancing beam of concentrated sunlight. Her eyes were wild and red with terrified tears, her arms and legs peppered by light burns. He eased her back from another beam and handed her off to his wife. “Archimedes! I need-”

“Please!” the young woman cried out, and to Niko’s surprise she squirmed out of Iphys’ arms. Skittishly, like a deer with a broken leg, she advanced forward towards the maze of bronze mirrors and the burning lances of sunlight they cast. “The Young Miss needs help! Please-!”

An old man’s frustrated shout came drifting in from the humble estate’s courtyard.

“Leave me ALONE!”

The Sand Reckoner, too, was the same as he always was.

“I’m not leaving without a ship,” Niko declared, and walked straight through the maze of burning lances. Most parted inexplicably to let him pass, and those that did graze him did little more than singe his silks. A pitiful show - the old man could have done better if he’d wanted.

Archimedes glared balefully at him when he entered. He was still white-haired and rail thin, his bloodshot eyes as manic as ever. He looked like every true philosopher that Niko had ever met.

“Master,” he greeted his old mentor. “I need a ship.”

“You and everyone else in this city,” the Sand Reckoner snapped. “Take a look around you at the ships I have to give! See any you like, boy?”

“No.” Just piles and piles of garbage.

“A shame, truly. Take the girl with you on your way out-”

“I’ll take that one.”

Niko pointed a finger at the man’s midsection - specifically, his ragged red attire. Archimedes’ eyes narrowed.

“You’re pointing at skin and bones, boy.”

“No.” Niko smiled pleasantly, coaxing the flames behind his eyes to burn bright hot. “I’m pointing at the ship you keep tucked in your cloak.”

VS 1.123+4 [Libertas]

Hero of the Scything Squall, Scythas

He raised the pewter cup to his lips-

And paused before it could touch them. He stared down at his golden reflection in the nectar.

“Hero?” Urania’s remnant statue whispered, puzzled.

The roads ahead of you are long. Drink of my drink, young Scythas, and be strong.

Spiraling beyond the Muse’s stone cage, five starlight paths still shimmered in his mind’s eye. Some parallel, others below - none higher than his own place on the mountain.

“May I borrow this cup?”

Urania’s stone lips curled.

—

Though you are a god, you were not deterred by any fear of angering the gods.

—

The Young Griffon

Where did I stand?

It felt like an eternity that I had been waiting. Waiting for someone to ask me that question and for them to truly mean it.

The Titan Flame posed the question with knowing dread. He suspected my answer, perhaps could see it in my soul before he’d even asked, and he understood the scope of it. It worried him. I could see in the tightening of his eyes and the clenching of his jaw that it agonized him to see his children take such an outrageous stance. I could feel his concern in the pounding of my own heart.

That didn’t change my answer. My virtuous heart may not have been adamant-wrought, but its convictions were immutable all the same.

Sol and I tilted our heads to regard each other at the same time, seeking each other’s answers and realizing at that moment that we both already knew. I smiled brightly while he snorted and failed to hide his smirk. In synchronicity we reached up, up to the towering statue of the amethyst-eyed Champion that we had both cut our teeth on stories of as boys. Up, to the golden blade Herakles had brandished challengingly at the skies in his final moments.

It was nearly too tall to reach without jumping, but reach we did. Straining, I laid my hand against one edge of the blade just above its hilt. Sol laid his hand against the other side, and as one we drew our palms sharply down. A swift line of burning sensation, and the skin of our palms parted without any jagged edges. Two clean cuts.

Prometheus had cleansed us of our myriad filths and brushed away our scrapes and bruises like he was smoothing over wet clay. Now we had only a single wound to mark our passage through the storm, even more stark for its singularity.

I held my bleeding palm up to the Titan Flame, and my brother did the same beside me.

“I stand against any existence that would rather press down than lift up,” I spoke clearly, staring up into the menacing light of twin suns. “Whatever their reasons may be, they are not good enough.”

The Titan Prometheus was a uniquely reviled existence. Traitor to his brothers the Titans for siding with the Father in his cosmic Titanomachy, and later a traitor to their usurping sons the Olympians in his theft of heavenly flame. Despised by Titans. Despised by gods. Forever cursed to suffer for his care, and forbidden even the coldest comfort of fond remembrance by those he’d given up everything for. They’d taken everything from him. From us.

We’d forgotten his name.

It was the uncertainty that killed a man. My father had taught me that lesson long ago. A man could suffer forty cracks of the whip without breaking down if he knew that forty was all he had to bear. By that same measure, a cultivator could watch lightning fall from a clear blue sky and ignore the terror of his animal instinct if he knew that it would fall. If he knew that advancement lay on the other side of tribulation, he could do more than weather it - he could seek it out. He could relish it.

To pursue the heights was to tempt the Fates, every man knew that. But he did it anyway, because he knew there was something far greater than any pain at the peak of the mountain. That was why we defied the Fates. That was why the Muses sang stories in our names.

That was how it was meant to be.

But now the peak was out of sight, shrouded by storm clouds and its highest paths buried in ice and snow. I had spent the entirety of my life wondering why no one acted in accordance with their own words, why the platitudes of cultivating virtue so rarely moved in step with the actions of supposed cultivators. I had only begun to understand the scope of it upon leaving my father’s city. I had only begun to suspect the existence of a universal ailment, a sickness of the earth inflicted by the heavens, upon my induction into the Orphic mysteries.

It was only here and now that I finally saw the root of that disease. This world was lesser than it should have been, little more than a flickering shadow on the wall, and people clung to that shadow because they knew nothing else beyond it. Not because they had no interest, no. Not because they lacked hunger. They had no choice.

“They took your name from us,” I told Prometheus, and though my heart felt like it would burn me to ashes in its wrath, I couldn’t help but laugh. “They hate you! Because you elevated us in the smallest of degrees! Because that was enough to make them wonder!”

The heavens had stripped us of our greatest shining stars and dared us to climb the mountain in darkness. It was the uncertainty that killed a man.

All any man ever needed to succeed was an example. All he had to know was that it could be done.

Prometheus was one of those examples. Here he was, here was proof that heaven was not infallible. The Titan hung as a living example of heaven’s impotent rage - and it was impotent, for all its grandeur. The chains of adamant, the stone-carved monuments to man’s hubris, and the immortal storm crown in its entirety. None of them changed that Prometheus had won. If only for an instant and in the smallest of degrees.

Heaven could lash Prometheus until the end of time, but it could not take back the flame he’d stolen in our name.

I remembered that now. I’d never forget it again.

“And you?” the Titan asked heavily of my brother.

Sol’s answer was succinct.

“No dogs under heaven.”

Then in hunger, this dog of heaven shall devour you.

The answer only made sense to me because he’d told me how his world had ended, back when we fled from the Rosy Dawn. It would have been nonsense to anyone else, but he seemed to think Prometheus would understand. And why not? He could reach out without placing a finger on our brows and rebalance us, refine us as cultivators as simply as brushing out the imperfections in a clay sculpture. Why wouldn’t he be able to reach into our memories as well?

My nose wrinkled, lips twisting at some half-imagined taste. What was the point of all the work if it could be undone or done better by a higher power? Where was the security of a sound mind if mortal memory could not be trusted? If all it took was sufficient standing to reach in and change what should have been immutable to all but its owner’s intent-

“You’ve only just begun to understand the forces arrayed against you,” the Titan Flame told me like he was answering my question, and with sudden cold fury I realized he was. Prometheus smiled that same bleak smile he’d worn when he first laid eyes on us. “And only the barest sliver of their powers over you. Even their gifts are a pox upon your souls - Heaven is cruel even to those that it wishes well. If you stand against it with purpose, you will suffer. You will be hurt in ways your fellow man could never think to hurt you. Ways you can not possibly understand.”

I was tired of being overestimated and looked down upon at the same time. Gathering up the eddies of my influence and boiling them with the mad flames of the Orphic House’s initiation rites, I struck out with the truth of my lived experience. My comprehension of Heaven’s cruelty.

I had seen Zagreus suffer in the Mother’s hands. For a brief moment, I had been him.

“I understand more than you think,” I told the Titan Flame. Sol grunted his rough agreement beside me.

For the first time, though, the target of my Orphic experience was not shaken. Prometheus only pounded his unshackled fist against the cliff behind him.

“You understand nothing. You don’t even know his name.”

“Zagreus,” Sol said. The Titan shook his head helplessly.

“Then who?” I challenged.

The Titan corrected us both.

[                  ]

What?

[                  ]

Worthless titan, why move your lips if you aren’t going to speak-

[KING OF NOTHING]

My vision went white. Over the roaring in my ears, I heard Sol exhale like he’d been punched in the gut.

[KING OF NO ONE]

How much had we forgotten?

[TWICE-BORN HEIR TO RAGING HEAVEN]

How much had been lost before we were even born?

[TWICE-CURSED BASTARD OF FALLEN STARS]

How much more did they plan to take from us?

[TWICE-NAMED AND TWICE-FORGOTTEN]

“Dio-” the Titan Flame spoke two syllables of a name, each one ringing my tripartite soul like a bell, and then his breath hitched in his throat. The twin stars of his eyes blazed in sudden alarm, and he looked up at the storm crown. “Already?”

In the furthest distance, a pinprick of light appeared. It was a different shade than the lightning, and where the lines of tribulation vanished as quickly as they came, this light lingered.

Prometheus’ alarm gave way to terror.

“Go,” he said, and when neither Sol nor I moved he roared, “LEAVE!”

“Why?” I couldn’t hear my own voice over the ringing in my ears.

“Too soon, it’s too soon!” The Titan shook his head and clenched his eyes shut, quenching their lights and leaving only the illumination of lightning and the steadily growing glow above. I traced the trajectory of the Champion’s golden sword and realized it was leveled directly at the blooming light.

“Too soon for what?” Sol shouted, but Prometheus wasn’t listening. He groaned in despair and lurched against his adamant bonds, wrenching fruitlessly at his manacles with the hand that Herakles had freed.

“The die is not yet cast. The clay is still wet, the world is still unwell - the wheel is still turning.” The Titan fell into broken ramblings, and the light above grew steadily brighter.

The sound of Sol rushing out from under the Champion’s statue was what finally tore my eyes from the light. I whipped my head around and watched him sprint away from the Titan, fleeing back down the mountain.

He got halfway there before I struck him like a javelin, tackling him to the stone and sending us both tumbling.

“Worthless Roman!” I shouted furiously, rolling up into a crouch and bringing each of my pankration limbs to bear. “Where do you think you’re going!?”

Sol rolled to a stop in a trench carved by his own overbearing weight and propped himself up with one arm, glaring balefully at me. Without a word, he reached into his shadow with his other hand and pulled a golden cup of wine from it. I stared at it. It was full to the brim.

“You had two-?”

Sol drank deeply from it, ignoring my outraged cry, and then dunked the half-emptied cup into the liquid lead pool of prima materia he’d been heading towards when I tackled him.

Ah.

Above our heads, the light had grown blindingly bright and spread further through the storm, suffusing the clouds with shades of crimson and gold. Prometheus’ eyes snapped open, staring up into it, and he bellowed in sudden defiance. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life, louder than any noise mortal ears were meant to hear.

And then it became the second loudest sound I’d ever heard, as a cry came down from on high and utterly overwhelmed it.

—

You gave men honors they did not deserve, possessions they were not entitled to.

—

Stone Sirens of the Storm

Among the dozens of statues that languished unseen within the immortal storm crown on Kaukoso Mons, eight alone stood out above the rest. It had been nine, before, but all that remained of Calliope now was rubble. Still, eight. Eight muses carved from hallowed stone, each of them protected from the storm by rings of stone-carved supplicants.

Time was a semantic concern at the peak of the mountain. No sun to rise and fall, no moon to wax and wane. Days passed as readily as years and as easily as centuries. Throughout it all, the statues of the Muses remained untouched. They were untainted by the passing of ages and unmarred by the grim light of tribulation.

The dull passage of eternity was its own unkindness, of course. It was rare for them to receive any company at all this far up the mountain. For all of them to receive a visit within the same day was a nigh unprecedented treat, and one they’d remember for ages to come.

That it had happened once made this a good decade already. That it had happened again not even a month later, that had made this a grand decade. Brief as it was, the conversation livened the holy women of the storm crown. It returned them to the earth from their high heavenly musing. Grounded them.

When a third guest rounded the mountain to pay their respects within that very same year, the stone sirens experienced a brief glimpse of emotion that they had not experienced in many many mortal lifetimes.

Excitement.

For four of the eight sirens, there were yet more curiosities in store. Bedraggled and near death, four little glories nonetheless found their way to the Muses that had marked their hearts just minutes after the third guest had departed them. Each of the four sirens were in such high spirits after their third visit that they didn’t even mind the pitiful sight of the fourth. That they had made it this far up the mountain was enticing enough.

“Welcome to my humble home,” Terpsichore the Dancer sang to the flickering little glory as they dragged themselves into the safety of her cage. A slender-faced young woman, though of course all of her kind were young to the siren, the little glory was ravaged by scars both inside and out.

The flame behind her eyes was dim, hardly more than warm coals as she collapsed to the ground at Terpischore’s feet. The little glory mumbled deliriously, static tremors causing the individual hairs on her haid to rise up apart from the rest. The fingertips of the hand that held her bronze sword were burnt black.

Terpsichore leaned in and watched the little glory as it watched her, dull eyes the color of desert heat flickering in hazy half-recognition. The young woman whispered a name in wonder, and Terpsichore giggled.

“I wonder, should I be offended or amused? Even if my face is carved from stone, confusing me for a man is simply too cruel - surely this ‘Song Yu’ isn’t nearly as beautiful as me.”

As she said it, a dim remembrance of the men known in the East as the Song of the South flickered in the flame behind the little glory’s eyes, close enough to the surface for the siren to see it. The Dancing Muse blinked stone eyes, pleasantly surprised.

“That is a lovely face,” she murmured appreciatively. The siren cupped her stone chin, then after a moment nodded decisively. “Very well, I’ll forgive your confusion.”

The little glory visibly forced her mind to clear, biting the inside of her cheek and blinking her eyes rapidly to clear them. Her gaze became searching, flitting up and down the siren’s form and lingering on her crown - a pair of wavy ram’s horns that looked almost out of place on her brow, so perfectly suited were they to act as the arms for a lyre.

“Terpsichore?” her little glory whispered.

“Erato?” rasped another, halfway around the mountain, hunching over to fit within the Lovely Muse’s cage while he cradled a mutilated crocodile in his arms.

“Polyhymnia?” wondered yet one more inside the Sacred Poet’s cage, leaning on his longbow like an overburdened cane when his broken legs refused to support his weight.

“Thalia?” gasped the last of them between panting breaths, slumping back against the stone cage and spending pneuma as fast as she inhaled it to mend her many wounds.

“The very same,” each siren answered, and each of them regarded the hearts that their other selves had claimed with naked curiosity. “Tell me, hero,” each of them bade, “what brings you up the mountain?”

Their answers varied in composition and intent, but each of their desires was the same.

Nectar.

Nectar for strength to walk the silk road, nectar for love and the bridging of its gaps, nectar for another’s anonymity, and nectar for a cure. Each of their desires were laid bare before the sirens, and each one alone was compelling in its way. Yet their actions were not matched to their ambitions, and each of the four sirens found themselves disappointed.

Perhaps it wasn’t fair of them. They’d received so much exceptional company recently, they’d become spoiled again. It was impressive enough that these little glories had made it to them at all. They’d earned themselves a touch of favor, the sirens decided.

And even if they hadn’t, it would be far too cruel for them to disregard their third guest’s wishes after he’d fought so hard to see them fulfilled.

“You’re in luck, little sword,” Terpsichore said, eyes crinkling cheerfully, and reached into her stone silks.

“Have hope, lover.” Erato pulled a drinking cup of flawless pearl from her stone robes, and held it up to the battered glory and his mangled crocodile.

“Rest easy, young shepherd,” Polyhymnia comforted the archer as his grip slackened on his bow and he sank down to his broken knees. She pressed her cup into his shaking hands.

“Look no further, sly bird.” Thalia the Joy winked, curling stone fingers over the cup of blood red brew she’d pressed into the breathless healer’s hands.

Each of the four sirens chipped away a small piece of themselves and dropped the slivers of stone into their cups. And though each of the sirens envied their sister for her choice of glory, they still smiled as their own little ones watched with bright-eyed wonder as the crimson poison in their cups turned to liquid gold.

“Drink of my drink and be strong,” they urged their guests. When their little glories thanked them desperately, emphatically, the sirens waved their gratitude away. Because they had only done the easiest of the work, and an eternity trapped in stone was no excuse for poor manners. “Don’t thank me. Thank the man that filled my cup for you.”

“What-”

“Someone was here-”

“When did they-”

“Who?”

Wistfully, the stone sirens answered.

“A hero.”

—

Because of that, you will remain on guard, here on this joyless rock, standing upright with your legs straight, and you will never sleep.

—

Jason, Hero of the Alabaster Isles

“A siren’s toying with the heart, I left beneath the sea!”

Through frigid rain and roaring thunder the captain of the sunken Icarus trudged along a mountain path in search of anything at all. He’d wandered for so long and endured so many hurts that he’d accept anything. Ideally the nectar, yes, but a friend would do just as well. A peer, failing that. Really, at this point he’d be thankful for another suffering statue.

“Let it be, let it be, let it be - I’ll find another better one!”

He dodged unnatural tendrils of grasping lightning, though by smaller margins every time. Every step forward dulled his reflexes just a bit more.

Jason came upon a fork in his path and hesitated. One branch continued on up, closer to the peak. The other lead down, retreating from the storm crown and returning to fresh air and sweet safety. Jason wavered between them.

The first and last time he’d set foot inside the Storm That Never Ceased, he’d only made it a single step. One step into the storm, and a second that he’d abandoned halfway.

Jason growled and turned away from the downslope, continuing up the path.

“A fine young heart of wanderlust, I didn’t mean to leave!”

He couldn’t sing the shanties he’d rowed along to with his crew. His lips just wouldn’t form the words, no matter how he tried to force them. Instead, he sang something new. The verses weren’t as catchy as they could have been, and he’d occasionally choke on the lyrics when his wounds asserted themselves, but it centered him.

It lacked the magic of Sol’s marching songs, failed to lighten his steps or steady his breath, but that was to be expected.

No matter where he went or who he brought with him, Sol remained himself. As for Jason?

What was a captain without his crew?

“Let it be, let it be, let it be - I’ll find another better one!”

A howl up ahead warned Jason of the threat before he saw it. A hound of coalescing lightning bounded down towards him in flashing leaps that burned his eyes and happened so fast the creature seemed to be springing through gaps in reality itself. Too fast to avoid. Too fast to escape. It braced again, close enough to count its crackling teeth, and he knew the next leap would be the last.

Jason exhaled raggedly and dragged the hound beneath the waves.

His pneuma flooded out with his breath, catching the hound in midair when it leapt and delivering it to the bottom of the sea. The hound made a strangled sound as his pneuma sought to crush it, but rather than cave in on itself as a real dog would, it burst apart and dispersed through his pneuma like water.

Jason had tried avoiding what came next, by physical and spiritual means, but it had never worked. This time he just braced himself as the lightning hound dispersed through his vital essence, through him, and through his feet into the mountain. He wavered like a drunk, tasting ozone and feeling as though he should be spitting blood, yet nothing came out of his mouth.

“That siren’s deaf beneath the waves, at least to all my pleas!”

Inside the storm crown or out of it, that fact hadn’t changed. Euterpe had nothing to say to him.

“Let it be, let it be, let it be…”

Another hound. No, two this time. He crushed them both and lurched forward as their currents flowed through him. This time the blinding light only cleared from one of his eyes. He squinted through the rain, searching for anything but another hound.

A crackling growl was his answer. If nothing else, he felt grim satisfaction as that growl turn to agonized baying. Then the lightning reached him.

“I’ll find another… better one…”

Blind and bleeding from within, the Hero of the Alabaster Isles fell.

Strong arms caught him before he hit the ground.

“Gah-!” Jason flinched, flailing weakly in their grip. Only now did he realize how badly the lightning had ravaged his muscles. Every contortion was agony, like a knife grinding against his bones.

“Easy,” came a low and soothing voice. He shouldn’t have been able to hear it over the cacophony of noise within the storm crown, but it reached his ears all the same. “Drink this.”

“Who- drink what?” No matter how many times Jason blinked his eyes or how tightly he clenched them shut, his vision didn’t return.

“You can’t see it?” the voice asked after a startled beat.

“No,” Jason rasped. Another part of him lost forever. Another failure. Turn back or continue on, neither choice had mattered in the end. He was still the captain of a sunken ship. Worthless. Worthless-

“Open your mouth.”

Jason blinked blind eyes. “Ha-?”

Boiling hot liquid poured into his mouth, and Jason had already swallowed twice in reflex before the taste of it exploded in his senses. It was the sweetest, spiciest, bitterest and most sour thing he’d ever tasted in his life. If kykeon was to wine as wine was to water, then this was the next step above - no, this was beyond that. There was more there, depth and immensity of flavor that his tongue had yet to unravel. It was so far beyond delicious it felt like an insult to describe it as such. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that trying to describe it with any word would be an insult.

Jason realized he could see again.

His savior looked down on him, their full lips pursed in concern, and with reluctance pulled the pewter cup back when it was half-depleted. They shook their head once, long blond hair whipping around and sticking to their cheeks.

“That’s all I can spare, I’m sorry. We’ll find you a physician later-”

“Scythas?” Jason exclaimed, just barely remembering to swallow the last of the golden brew he’d been given before he spoke.

The Hero of the Scything Squall breathed a sigh of relief. “So it did clear up your eyes.” His lips smoothing out into a faint smirk. “Or you finally recognized my voice.”

It had done more than clear his eyes up. Jason looked up at Scythas and saw him with greater clarity than he’d had before marching into the storm crown. When he desired it, the flames behind his eyes could illuminate the dark corners of rooms or the shadows between trees when he desired it. This, though? This was something else entirely. The world as he saw it was aglow, vibrant and thrumming with energies he’d at times been able to perceive but never so vividly see.

His vision wasn’t the only wound that had been mended. The golden liquid coursed through him, burning like good wine if wine were a thousand times more potent, and everywhere it went it healed him. Then it refined him. And then… then it kept going. It wound its way through him and everything it touched was rebuilt, then broken down and rebuilt better still.

“Is that-?” Jason asked, but cut himself off with a grimace. “Thank you. That’s twice you’ve saved me now.”

“It is,” Scythas answered his first question, wearily amused. “And twice is a stretch. I’d say Solus saved us both in that alley.”

That may have been true, but it had been Scythas’ hands that pulled him free of the crows. Jason bit down on those words, though, focusing on the first thing Scythas had said. Not an acknowledgement of his thanks. An answer to his question.

It is.

Divine nectar, in all its golden glory.

Jason laughed breathlessly. “The Fates are kind after all.”

Scythas raised an eyebrow.

“My eyes are better than they ever were before, and I still can’t see more than a few feet in front of my face,” Jason explained, grinning. “What are the chances that you’d stumble onto me, here and now, in the midst of all this chaos with a spare cup of nectar in your hand? Seems the weavers decided I was due a break.”

Scythas clicked his tongue. “If only.”

Jason blinked.

“If the Fates were on our side, I’d have gone with my gut and tracked you down first instead of wasting time looking for your Muse. I should have known better.”

Several questions came to mind at that moment. Jason voiced the loudest of them.

“You tracked me through the storm? You can do that?”

“Of course not. I had help.” His bright eyes flicked up.

In Jason’s new sight, the pewter crown of stars upon Scythas’ brow glowed silver-bright.

—

You will often scream in pain and sorrow.

—

The Young Griffon

The Broad’s theory of the tripartite soul was universally known among cultivators of the modern age. Even the furthest reaches of enlightened civilization understood that a man existed in three parts, reason and passion and hunger. It was a given. Like the color of the sky and the progression of numbers.

Less ubiquitous, but only just, was his theory of Forms. Centuries ago the Broad had proposed the idea of another existence, another state of being that existed apart from us. Above us. A realm of higher existences, of perfect existences, that our sunken earth could only imitate in the clumsiest sense.

The Broad insisted that every idea under the sun existed in this perfect realm. That the household pet you called a hound because it walked on four legs, barked, and came when you called it, was only a pale imitation of the real thing. That there existed a higher power, a perfect Hound, whose image every lowly dog was shaped in.

Anything that you could think of, anything that had ever been or ever would be, their Forms had their place above ours. Everything. Even a man. Such was the theory of immutable Forms.

Or, as I had come to understand them, Ideals.

The source of growing light shrieked, drowning out the storm crown’s thunder and Prometheus’ roar both. I clapped both hands over my ears and along with all of my pankration hands and it did just short of nothing for me. I listed sideways, the world wavering around me, and collapsed onto my side. Through bleary eyes, I saw Sol follow suit beside me.

I shouted a warning that neither of us could hear and reached out with the limbs of my intent, but they swayed and slapped into each other like drunkards. I could do nothing but watch as the golden cup of wine and liquid lead slipped out of Sol’s hand and fell, splattering its contents across the stone.

It only took Sol a moment longer than me to steady himself, winded as he was by the additional weight of thirty men falling along with him. It was still too late. He lurched out of the crater he’d made and caught the golden cup as it bounced.

Empty. The color drained from his face. He looked to me, and there was nothing I could say.

“LEAVE!” Prometheus shouted down at us. I felt the word more than I heard it.

The nectar, Sol mouthed in bleak denial.

Prometheus’ jerked in his chains, looking down at us with wide eyes.

“The what-”

The clouds broke and burnt away above our heads. I looked up, and I saw-

Light.

The story goes that as punishment for his betrayal and his hubris on mankind’s behalf, the Father had ordered Prometheus bound and left to rot forever more. The Father cursed him to isolation without end, and because that was not enough, He plucked an eagle from the heavens and commanded it to tear the captive Titan’s liver out and eat it while he watched. He demanded the eagle return the next day, once the Flame’s body had been made whole again, to do it all again. And every day after.

What emerged from the storm crown above was no eagle.

It was living light that came plunging through the Storm That Never Ceased, a creature of scarlet flame nearly the size of Prometheus himself and free of binding chains. Larger than any beast that walked the earth, large enough to catch a whale between its talons and lift it from the sea. Outrageous. Indescribable.

In his moment of distraction, Prometheus was left unprepared for the attack. The eagle of the caucasus, the phoenix, struck him like a comet. Every amethyst vein in sight, along with the Champion’s gem eyes, flared pure white. The phoenix shrieked and sank its enormous talons into the Titan’s flesh.

Prometheus screamed.

I lurched up to my feet, eyes painfully wide, and stared up at a beast above virtue.

The living flame pinned Prometheus’ only free limb with one foot, talons each the size of the Eos cutting trenches in the Titan’s wrist and cauterizing them in the same instant. The talons of its other foot stabbed straight through the Titan’s thigh, anchoring the predator to him while he thrashed and screamed in agony.

If it truly was as the Broad’s theory insisted, that there hung a higher realm above our own where the best of our ideals existed in unmarred perfection, then the question of cultivation was changed. It ceased to be a question of if, and instead became a question of how? Not if a man can ascend, but how.

So long as there’s a place to go, a path there can be found. And if no such path exists, it can be made. All that’s needed is a goal. All that any man needs is a dream to aspire towards.

If the Broad’s theory was accepted, then it followed that a perfect Man existed somewhere above and apart from us, a higher power that we could emulate. That was the basis of cultivation, in the end. Refining ourselves, purging ourselves of our impurities and imperfections, the portions of our body and soul that stood out in ugly contrast to the ideal.

If that was true of man, high-minded and complex as he was, the same must hold true for beasts. And how did the baser creatures of the earth cultivate?

They ate.

Without preamble or remorse for its prey, the eagle of the caucasus dipped its head and tore Prometheus’ innards from his stomach.

Liquid gold sprayed out of the wound and fell like rain down on our heads. Prometheus howled, eyes bulging and mouth opened wide enough to crack his jaw. The phoenix tilted its head back in a cruel mirror motion to the Titan, snapping its flaming beak as it swallowed down a chunk of flesh the size of a horse. All the while its existence spread through the eye of the storm crown, bathing everything in its gold and scarlet glow and warming all the world around it.

The creature’s savage majesty almost seemed to push against the storm itself - no, not seemed to. It was. Before my eyes, its gold and scarlet glory pressed against the edges of the eye and pitted the phoenix’s might against the storm crown’s. The storm shifted, began to give.

A bolt of tribulation lightning fell from heaven and struck the phoenix between its wings. Another struck before the first could find its thunder. Then a third, a fourth, a dozen and a hundred and a thousand after that. A thousand-thousand, and a thousand-thousand of those, all of them centered on the eagle of the caucuses.

Lightning enough to scour any Tyrant from this earth hammered down on the living flame, and in response it cried out a single mocking note and spread its wings wide. Lightning struck every finger width of them, no less concentrated than before, and the phoenix ignored them all as it dipped its head and tore another chunk out of Prometheus’ side.

Standing awash in scarlet heat and golden glory, I beheld the manifestation of a higher ideal. Staring up like my savage ancestors before me, I saw a creature unfettered by the chains that bound me to this earth. A beast unbothered by heaven’s wrath. I saw now what they had imagined then, the purest truth to their hollow-boned imitation. A perfect Form.

“Libertas,” Sol breathed in the voice of his soul, and in my heart it was so.

“BOYS!”

Sol and I jerked as if from a dead sleep, cold water sensation dousing our wonder. My eyes shifted reluctantly from the phoenix, from Libertas, and met Prometheus’ gaze. The Titan’s face was eerily statuesque even in this moment, strained as it was by suffering. He groaned loudly through clenched teeth as Libertas shifted its footing and dug its talons deeper into him.

Somehow, the Titan retained his focus through it all. If anything, his urgency had redoubled.

“Catch it!” Prometheus shouted, his voice rising in agony part way through as Libertas took another chunk of flesh from him. “Before it hits the ground! Catch it in your cup!”

Catch-?

“The blood,” the raven in Sol’s shadow snapped at mine, and for the first time since the phoenix’s arrival I looked down at the mountain.

Golden ichor fell like rain in fat droplets, and heavier from the wounds where the Titan’s life blood flowed thickest. Yet somehow, in spite of that downpour, there wasn’t a speck of gold to be found on Kaukoso Mons. Nothing but overflowing pools and rivers of liquid lead.

As Sol rushed forward to catch a golden drop in his empty cup, I saw one the size of my fist hit the ground beneath the Titan’s feet and turn instantaneously to lead.

Prima materia.

Impossible, my common sense protested. I smothered it to silence and raced after my brother.

As I rushed across the lead-slicked stone, I reached into my flickering shadow with pankration hands and brought forth each of the ingredients our companions had gathered for our cause. Chunks of sulfur and cinnabar, a fistful of black lava salt and three more of herbs and spices. A cupped hand full of honey and another full of milk. Coins of silver and coins of lead. A single vibrant blue flower, its petals burning at their edges.

Sol planted his feet and raised his cup to a thin stream of falling ichor. I slid to a stop beside him, heart pounding wildly in my chest.

We still needed the wine.

I inhaled sharply and punched Sol in the gut as hard as I could. He was watching the falling string of ichor above, utterly unprepared, and the blow folded him over my fist. The Roman gagged once and vomited Orphic wine into my cupped pankration hands.

I reached up and guided his cup while he recovered, catching the falling strand of golden ichor out of the air and twirling the cup to catch it again when it sloshed out. As I did, I added the ingredients for each of the four phases in a continuous cascade. Solus had described it as a process of slow burning days to progress through the blackening, whitening, yellowing, and reddening of the brew.

Here and now, the strand of liquid gold turned to black, then white, then a bright yellow as quickly as I could dump the ingredients into the cup. Sol sucked in a breath and straightened as the last of the reagents were added in and the tail end of the falling string hit the cup.

Sol snapped his wrist sharply around, catching the stray drops kicked up by falling ichor and stirring the mixture with the motion. The whirlpool darkened as it slowed, and when the surface settled the cup was filled and it was done.

Start to finish, all of it in a single pour.

I looked to Sol, grinning in wild excitement, just in time to see him follow through and bury his fist in my stomach with the strength of thirty men behind it.

When I finally stopped dry heaving, I gave the smug bastard a filthy look.

“Worthless Roman. I punched you for a good cause.”

“So did I.”

We glared at each other while the world fought not to come apart above our heads, while crashing thunder and endless falling spears of lightning fell upon the phoenix of the caucasus as it gutted Prometheus alive. I cracked first, lips curling against my will, and that cracked Sol in turn. He didn’t smirk. It wasn’t a faint gesture of distant amusement.

For the first time in all the months I’d known him, Sol smiled in excited wonder. In pure and honest joy.

Reaching up, I caught a falling string of golden ichor in the hand I’d marked with the Champion’s blade. It pooled in my cupped palm, mingling with my blood, and it burned hotter than any flame I’d ever held before. I considered it thoughtfully, Sol watching me with expectant curiosity as I did.

But rather than drinking from it myself, I offered my cupped palm up to my brother. He stared at it. Then me.

Prometheus had warned us both that we stood no chance against the wrath of heaven, and the truth of it still raged above our heads. We were all of us alone when we challenged the Fates, and what man could face this on their own? It was the grim indictment that every cultivator accepted the moment they began the climb. It was simply the way of things.

Every man faced heaven alone in the end.

As if I’d accept that.

“No dogs under heaven,” I vowed, and the last barrier fell. Sol reached up with the hand he’d cut with the Champion’s blade and caught his own stream of golden ichor in hand. He offered it up to me as I had offered mine.

“No more higher powers,” he vowed in turn, and from each other’s palms we drank of the Titan Flame’s ichor. It burned beautifully, more potent than any kykeon could possibly be, and I felt each portion of my tripartite soul seize greedily upon it.

The next thing I felt was the notice of an otherworldly predator.

Libertas stared down at us, head cocked to the side. Curiosity, or perhaps faint surprise. It hadn’t known we were here, or we hadn’t been worth its notice.

Not until now.

The phoenix of the caucasus beat its wings once and tore its talons free of the Titan Flame, rounding on us and swooping down-

A titanic hand marred by burnt lacerations wrapped around the phoenix’s left leg and heaved it back. Libertas shrieked furiously and Prometheus slammed it against the cliff face in response.

“GO!” the Titan Flame roared, the sound of it turning swiftly from frantic rage to horrible pain as Libertas battered him against the stone with burning wings and turned its talons upon him once more. Still he held it fast, even when it tore out his throat. Even when it gouged out his eyes.

Sol and I turned and sprinted back into the storm crown. We bounded back down Kaukoso Mons, terrified and exhilarated and enlightened.

It felt like flying.

—

For the Father’s heart is harsh, and everyone whose ruling power is new is ruthlessly cruel.

—

1.122

—

Then, in the morning, once again the sun will melt the frost.

—

The Young Griffon

On the day of my first Thargelia, when I was still young enough to fear the kiss of a burning flame, my father had broken with the Rosy Dawn’s traditions and allowed me to sit on his lap and watch the proceedings of the festival with him. I hadn’t understood why this was such a scandalous act at the time, but in retrospect it was obvious.

On this holiday above all others, the kyrios was both judge and jury. He was justice. Allowing a child to sit that throne with him had been hubris enough to have the cult’s most pious initiates eyeing the skies in search of lightning. My father hadn’t cared for their complaints, of course.

The Thargelia was a celebration of life and of beginnings, positioned as it was at the start of summer and the very first harvest of the year. It was a holiday held dear in every Alikon heart, though the unawoken didn’t know exactly why that was - namely, because it was a celebration of our very own scarlet faith. Our fallen sun god was dead, bisected and buried in the hearts of our mountain ranges without a name to mark his graves, but that did not mean he was entirely forgotten.

We honored him with the Thargelia, and we sacrificed in his forgotten name as we did for all the pantheon. In this particular case, we sacrificed ourselves.

The pharmakos were the most important part of the festival, scapegoats chosen to take the city’s vices and hubrises upon themselves and be punished for them all, so that the masses might be cleansed. Two were chosen every year, one by each of the Scarlet City’s Tyrants, and their punishment was carried out in the valley city’s Scarlet Stadium.

Each year, the circumstances of those chosen and their punishments changed. Sometimes it was for vanity - the ugliest of the city’s dregs brought forth and beaten down. Other times it was for retribution - the worst of the lawbreakers, profane murderers and the truly unhinged made to account for their crimes as well as the crimes of others. Depending on the criteria of those chosen, the severity of the punishments varied. Some years the pharmakos lived to dread another Thargelia. But only some.

The Tyrants of the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk chose their own scapegoat and presided over their punishment as they saw fit, but the manner of their punishment and the severity had to match. It had always been that way, even before my father’s rise to power. Besides that, the only other commonality was the stock from which every scapegoat was chosen.

Whether they were selected for vanity or for retribution, the pharmakos were always slaves.

That year, the pharmakos had been selected for retribution. The wretched pair of slaves marched out onto the sands of the stadium pit were criminals of the same kind, charged by Damon Aetos and Yianni Scala both for thievery. In the Scarlet City, the common punishment for theft was the loss of four fingers.

That was only for full-blooded citizens, though. For a slave, the punishment was at their master’s discretion. It could be anything, up to and including death.

That year, the Tyrants of the Scarlet City chose scourging.

The Alikon masses hurled ridicule and condemnation down from the stadium stands while the thieves were brought out and forced to kneel in the sand. It was tradition, naturally, and some embraced it more gleefully than others. The pharmakos were on trial for more than just their own crimes. On that day, they were on trial for us all.

Eight unawoken men holding whips surrounded the pharmakos, four to a thief, and at the Tyrants’ orders they began their lashing.

It took me no time at all to notice a difference between the two scapegoats.

Though they were both undeniably wretched existences, already bruised and battered long before they’d been delivered to the pit, their reactions to the scourging couldn’t have been more different. Though they were in equally poor shape, and though each of the city’s men did their level best to crack their whips with uniform strength, the slave from the Rosy Dawn endured his punishment with grace.

While the thief from the Burning Dusk cowered and begged for mercy, crying out sharply after every lash, the thief my father had selected rode his lashes out with as much restraint as any man in chains could hope for. It wasn’t that he couldn’t feel the whip. There were some agonized noises he didn’t have the strength to hold back, pained grunts and breathless groans. But there was something…

“You’ve noticed,” Damon Aetos had declared. “One man is afraid. The other isn’t.

“Do you know why?”

Naturally, I hadn’t.

“These men are thieves, and before that they are slaves. It is within my power to have them executed for their crimes. It is also within my power to spare them. The lash is an uncertain weapon - a half death. It can take a life as easily as it can spare it.”

That didn’t explain why one man was terrified and the other man resigned. Amidst the screaming condemnations of the citizens, my father had elaborated.

“It is by my judgment that these thieves will be given forty lashes each, delivered by mortal men with plain leather whips.” My father had raised a finger and pointed at the Rosy Dawn’s thief. “The only difference between the two of them is that I told that man how many lashes he’d receive.”

At the time, it had felt like a contradiction. Forty lashes was enough to kill a man, depending on the strength behind them. I had puzzled over it while they received their seventh, eighth, and ninth ones. Scourging wasn’t an uncommon punishment for a slave and often ended well short of the mark my father had set. The slave from the Burning Dusk didn’t know what the number of lashes was, but that could have been a boon. For all he knew, he might only have ten in store - the man my father had chosen knew that he had thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one more cracks of the whip until he was done. Shouldn’t that have been the far heavier source of dread?

We’d watched, together, as the thief from the Burning Dusk continued to moan and weep after the fortieth lash was done. And we’d watched as the thief from the Rosy Dawn had simply slumped forward into the sand in weary relief, knowing that his suffering was over. Damon Aetos had nodded as if his point had been proven, and explained.

“The whip is agony. The uncertainty is worse.”

—

This never-ending burden of your present agony will wear you down, for the one who is to rescue you someday is not yet even born.

—

I took Prometheus’ chain in my hands and wrenched at it with all my might.

The adamant links were enormous, each one longer than my torso and thicker around than my arms. I braced my feet against the cliff face that the Titan Flame was shackled to and strained with all that I had against one of the links holding his left arm in place. I gnashed my teeth, rosy flames and tribulation lightning pouring off the twenty-nine hands of my pankration intent.

“A hand, slave?” I called out in a strained voice. There came a crack of lightning and a shock of bright white sensation on my left cheek. I stared at Sol in disbelief.

“You slapped me with my own hand?”

“Anything for the Young Aristocrat,” he said without a hint of mirth, tucking my lightning limb away and bracing himself on the other side of the adamant link. He wrenched at it with all the strength he’d taken from the Orphic House.

“Don’t call me that,” I said, horribly offended.

He snorted, and I let my own smile break free.

“On pull, then - pull!”

It was at this point that Prometheus came to.

“What are you-? Stop!” the Titan’s alarm was intense, seemingly enough to snap him fully from the throes of his suffering. He reached down for us and my heart did its best to leap out of my chest. His hand was enormous, longer fingertip-to-palm than I was tall. Again, I was struck by the staggering difference between Titan and man.

“Pull!” I shouted, and Sol and I heaved back on the adamant chain with all that we were worth. The Titan’s hand hesitated just a few feet from us, fingers flexing. I inhaled sharply. “Pull!”

The adamant held. An unbreakable chain wrought by higher powers, crafted to bind the only one among them worth admiring. I snarled, steam erupting from between my clenched teeth. Lightning flashed behind Sol’s eyes.

“That’s enough!”

The Titan Flame brushed us off. Try as we might, Sol and I couldn’t resist him - though he moved us like we were made of thin and brittle clay, Sol and I might as well have tried to hold the sun back from rising. We were both flung away from the Titan, tumbling across the stone and settling at the feet of the Champion’s statue.

“These chains are heavenly law,” Prometheus urgently warned us. “It’s impossible to break them. You endanger yourselves by even trying!”

I reached up and rapped my knuckles against the Champion’s own hand, the one holding a broken link of adamant.

“Not impossible,” Sol said, putting it to words.

There was grief in the Titan’s eyes, sorrow in his sonorous voice when he replied, “Not for him. But the Champion’s time is long past, my own time longer still. Strength alone is no longer enough. In this world of tarnished iron, adamant is immutable.”

“Then why hesitate?” I challenged him. The weight of the Titan’s stare was staggering, but I had been raised by a higher power of my own. I had long since learned to take it in stride. “You could have brushed us off immediately, but you didn’t. You hesitated. Why?”

I expected the Titan to lie or ignore the question entirely, perhaps lash out at me for daring to question him when I was infinitely his lesser. Instead, he told me the truth.

“For a moment, I hoped I would be wrong,” the Titan Flame admitted.

There was no deceit in the burning suns that were his eyes. Only an ancient weariness.

“It doesn’t matter. Whether or not it’s possible, regardless of if you’re ivory or if you’re horn, you’re here too early.” The light that he was casting grew brighter, harsher and more stark - everything bathed within that glow seemed to sharpen and grow more vibrant.

Sol and I were no exception.

[                         ]

In the Temple of the Father so many weeks ago, Sol and I had consumed the starlight marrow of a Tyrant and been forced to match our souls against it. The Rein-Holder’s will had attempted to break us down and make us slaves within ourselves, and until the day I died I would never forget the sensation of it burning through my body. It had been an enemy until I made it mine. It had fought me bitterly, furiously, until the very end.

The moment I felt the influence of another, warm beneath my skin, I inhaled sharply and brought all of my pneuma and my influence and my will to bear against it. Beside me, I heard Sol do the same. No matter how unjust the Flame’s punishment may have been, no matter if slipping into another’s skin was the only way he’d ever be free, it wouldn’t be one of us that made the sacrifice. I refused. I wouldn’t allow it.

It was like throwing a punch with all my strength behind it and hitting nothing but the open air.

The warmth of a steady hearth seeped into me and immediately joined itself to my will, shaping itself to my image without a fight. No, it was more than that. The Flame’s essence was helping me incorporate it into myself.

Everything the golden glow touched was made better than it had been before. I was abruptly reminded of the sensation of Anastasia’s caustic pneuma burning through my body, cleansing and mending me in a way that I’d considered to be sophisticated at the time. This was so far beyond that, calling it healing felt like a disservice.

Whatever he’d done to us before to balance our humors and expel the excess impurities from our bodies, it had happened in an instant and had only been noticeable in its passing. This was a mending of a different sort. The myriad bruises and bleeding abrasions that Sol and I had suffered on our way to the peak were made well before our eyes. The warmth stayed, added itself to our own vital heat and bolstered us with its presence. And when it was clear that we had it in our control, the Titan relinquished it to us without a fight.

The necklace I’d stolen from the Aetos family’s filial pools reflected the golden glow, its scarlet gem burning like an ember against my chest. With a start, I realized even the ragged silks of my Rosy Dawn attire had been made pristine again.

How do you mend what can’t be mended?

“It’s you,” I realized. I looked up at the Titan Flame with certainty in my soul. He was the cure. “Teach me.”

The Titan shook his head. “I can not.”

“I’ll break those chains myself,” I promised him. “I’ll finish what the Champion started and deliver you from your torment. On the Styx I swear I’ll see it done!”

“You scarlet sons are all the same,” Prometheus murmured, looking at me with pity.

Looking down at me.

“Griffon,” Sol warned, gripping my shoulder tight. I fought for control of thirty pankration fists. Somehow, the Titan’s bolstering essence didn’t make it any easier. Damn it. Damn it. I couldn’t stop my mind from racing, envisioning all the wrongs that could be made right if an existence like the Flame still walked the earth.

Since the day I’d left the Scarlet City, I had spent every day searching for the fireside legends whose stories I’d been raised on. In the months that I’d spent in Olympia and distant Thracia, the only evidence I’d found that those legends were ever true at all had been dead men. It had been enough to make me wonder. It had been enough to make me doubt.

A man could endure the whip for half an eternity if he knew that it would stop. He could brave the most treacherous mountain path so long as he knew it would lead him up to heaven. Could overcome ten of heaven’s most harrowing labors if only he knew that the tenth was where it ended.

It was the uncertainty that killed you.

Crouched beneath the Champion’s towering statue and looking up at a living relic of a golden era, I finally saw the flame that cast the shadows in the cave. Here was something real. Here was something pure.

Here was what this world of iron needed-

“Tell me something, boys,” Prometheus spoke, though he almost seemed to dread the answer. “Where do you stand among heaven and earth?”

I stared up at the Titan in disbelief.

Even you?

“Philosopher, second rank,” I said numbly, after Sol had given his own answer. I should have known. More fool me, I should have known no one was above the ladder. We were all of us condemned-

“No, you’re not listening,” Prometheus said, slashing his free hand through the air to dispel our answers and buffeting us both with gale winds. “I asked you where you stand.”

The Titan Flame lifted his head up to the black skies above.

“With the heavens?”

His head dipped back down, piercing both of us with the light of twin suns.

“Or against them.”

—

This is your reward for acting as a friend to human beings.

—

1.121

Bigs thanks to all of you that went out and picked up a copy of the ebook/paperback/hardcover/audiobook. Truly blessed by the response, and can only hope this story continues to deliver for you boys.

NaNoWriMo begins today, and though I didn't manage to wrap this sequence up in a single 10-12k monster chapter like I'd originally planned, I figured I've made you wait long enough. It's never going to be perfect so it might as well be done. Did my best with it anyway. Hope ya enjoy it.

---

The Young Griffon

A Titan is to an Olympian as an Olympian is to a Man.

The Titan Prometheus was larger than anything I’d ever seen with my own two eyes. Large enough that it almost seemed like I could reach out and touch him, despite the dizzying distance that separated Sol and I from the peak of peaks on Kaukoso Mons. Greater than any Tyrant could hope to be, a hundred hands to the Heroic Orpheus’ twenty-five. He could have wrestled the monstrous dragon spirits of the Brothers Aetos’ epic as easily as I had the Heroic Huntsman’s crocodile familiar, and wrung them out each like bloody rags.

He looked like a man writ entirely too large, but there was an uncanny beauty to his proportions that I understood only belatedly. His frame and its features, they were all perfect.

Though the Titan hung from the peak of Kaukoso Mons, left arm and both legs suspended by chains of cruel adamant, he did not appear frail. Though his hair was tangled and slick with sweat, like curling rings of smoke plastered to his forehead, it did not appear unkempt. The tightness around his eyes and the clenching of his jaw, the impotent pain, it did not make him seem pitiful. It was as if in every shifting moment he had been chiseled out of the mountain by a sculptor’s loving hand - an artist’s idealized depiction of a suffering man rather than the living reality.

Larger than life was not a meaningful descriptor. A mortal mind was incapable of constructing a framework capable of containing the Titan Flame. He defied description. He existed in spite of all common sense.

He was looking at us.

Prometheus opened his mouth to speak and the world held its breath to hear him. His teeth and his tongue were stained by glittering liquid gold.

“Captain of salt and ash,” spoke the Thief of Flame, with dark and weary humor. His voice shook the blood in my veins and bid every muscle in my body to clench. It made the flashing lights of the storm crown burn somehow brighter all around us. “Where have your legions gone this time? You’re ever a sorry sight without them.”

Sol stared up at the Titan, stricken beyond words. Prometheus chuckled weakly, and the mountain stone rumbled beneath our feet.

“What a terrible expression. Am I truly so ghastly? No, don’t answer that - my grief is overwhelming as it is.”

Those burning eyes shifted and the full weight of the Titan’s attention struck me like a comet. There was no pneuma, no influence, no flicker of the heart that any of my refined senses could detect. Prometheus looked upon me plainly and it was like I’d stepped into the sun.

“And you must be-”

Surprise flickered in the light of twin stars.

“Young blood?”

—

“High-minded son and brazen thief of flame - against my will and yours, I must bind you with chains of adamant which no one can remove to this cliff face.”

—

Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall

Scythas ran with no hope of true escape.

The alchemical furnace was an overwhelming weight in his arms, its contents far heavier for their significance than the stone furnace itself. He was forced to run like a drunkard through the Storm That Never Ceased, lurching and stumbling without grace as the lightning pursued him. If he moved the way his body knew how to move, he’d surely spill the brew.

Take it.

He’d die before he spilled a drop.

As the seconds passed and drew their scars across his heart, the fire behind his eyes burned brighter and brighter. Scythas knew that death was not far behind him.

The initiation rites of the Raging Heaven Cult were unlike any other in the Free Mediterranean. They were dangerous to every cultivator that dared undergo them. Standing made no difference. Family ties, political power, refinement of the soul - in any other mystery cult, these things mattered. Anywhere outside of Olympia, high standing was its own assurance of success.

The storm crown did not care.

When hopeful initiates of the Raging Heaven Cult stepped into the storm, they were only obligated to take a single step away from their peers. One step, one transgression against the heavens, was proof enough according to the kyrios. They were joined each year by their would-be seniors, advanced Philosophers and Heroic souls that had burnt their hearts’ blood in search of glory.

The intent was for their seniors to pierce through the storm crown ahead of the new prospects and clear a path for them to climb. If not to make it easy, then at least to make it possible.

Yet each year, those senior Sophists and Heroic souls were some of the first to come racing back down the mountain. Wild-eyed and with their hearts in their throats. Senselessly terrified, every one.

Scythas knew this, because he had been the first of the Heroes to turn back when his turn had come. One step alone into the storm crown and no further. He’d taken that first step, realized he could no longer hear the whispers on the wind, and he turned away in naked terror. Jason had come lunging out just a split second after him.

Their peers had named them cowards for it later, accused them of abandoning their juniors, and Scythas hadn’t been able to deny it. But though they hadn’t been wrong, they also hadn’t been much better. Every one of their Heroic peers had fled the storm crown before the last of the initiates, when they were meant to be the shepherds from the beginning to the very end.

They had all failed. Scythas had simply failed first and most profoundly.

“Pathetic,” the Hurricane Hierophant had branded him, the most disappointed that Scythas had ever seen the man. The Tyrant’s daughter had looked upon him with tears in her eyes, so disappointed was she in her future husband.

“Pathetic,” the kyrios had agreed the next time they spoke. “Though the king has little room to talk. One step alone is more than he’d ever dare transgress.”

The scholars of the Raging Heaven Cult did everything they could to distinguish themselves so that they might earn a place to sleep that was further from the storm. The Heroic souls that hoped to one day challenge the Fates themselves could only measure their time within the storm crown in seconds before they each turned back in shame. The Tyrant Elders of Olympia wouldn’t even look upon the storm. The reason for all three behaviors was the same.

A clap of thunder and howling wolves threw Scythas from his feet. Tumbling, he clutched the stone furnace desperately and raised it up. He twisted and allowed his body to be battered while he caught the sloshing red liquid out of the air and returned it to its basin. He whistled frantically, burning his heart’s blood, and cutting winds blasted out from him in every direction.

A hound of seething lightning caught a wind scythe in its teeth and bit down. A strand of tribulation’s light arched through the air between them, tracing Scythas’ pneuma back to him and striking him over his heart. His back arched in helpless agony.

Urania! he called out, but his plea went unanswered.

The storm crown didn’t care where you stood. It only cared to tear you down. It only sought to unmake you,

And it would not cease until its work was done.

Tucking the furnace under one arm, Scythas drew his sword with the other and buried it in the hound’s skull when it lunged for him.

The dog did not die, but it was flung away in an explosion of concussive force. Scythas fared no better He let the blade go careening into the storm clouds and wrapped his numb arms around the furnace, curling his body around it and whistling a prayer to the wind.

The further he cast out his pneuma, the more eyes within the storm he drew. Even this much was tempting the Fates, but he had made a promise to himself and a promise to Solus. He would take the risk.

The wind caught every drop of nectar that the explosion had flung into the air and returned them to the furnace. The storm dashed it from his control a split second later.

Scythas slammed into an upright column of stone and bit halfway through his tongue. He slumped down, bleeding from his mouth and only seeing half the world through glassy eyes. He wasted precious moments like that, fighting for control of his senses as the storm saught to finish what the Gadfly had begun.

When a woman’s familiar face leaned down into his blurred vision, Scythas was certain that he was only seeing stars. Yet as his eyesight slowly cleared, she grew more prominent in his view instead of less. Not a fleeting trick of the storm’s light, nor the nearly transparent constellation that he had known her as since his ascension. The woman leaning over him, peering out from a cage made up of suffering men and women, was carved entirely from stone.

“I am with you, hero,” the statue of Urania assured him, stone lips curling impossibly into a fond smile as she regarded him. “Now as ever. Here until the end.”

—

“Far from all mortal men, where you will never hear a human voice or glimpse a human shape.”

—

The Young Griffon

A dead man looked down on me with sly eyes, leaning over the edge of the balcony, his place of prominence inside the Orphic House.

“Tell me-”

“Young blood,” the Titan Prometheus said again, a low murmur that threatened to deafen me. He raised his right hand to cover his face, abruptly disoriented. “No, that’s not…”

I traced the dangling chain that hung from the manacle around his right wrist. The manacles were made of the same material as the chains, a dazzling synthesis of ruby and sapphire and amethyst joined. Unbreakable adamant.

“Look,” I hissed. The lightning limb that Sol had claimed reached up and grabbed the back of his neck, forcing him to look down.

That the Titan could move his right hand at all should have been impossible. The chain meant to hold his right arm tight against the cliff face hung free instead, swaying with the motion of his arm and terminating at a single broken chain. Who could have done such a thing? No one. It was an impossible question, because it had no answer - adamant was immutable once forged.

The impossible answer stood beneath Prometheus’ feet, immortalized in tribulation stone.

Barring the Titan Porphyrion, it was the tallest statue on the mountain. It was a man, if such a thing could be believed, both broad-shouldered and heavily muscled even for his size. The clothing carved for him from stone was a humble contrast to the fineries of the Tyrants that languished in the storm. Heaven’s hand had chiseled for him only a tunic of plain cloth and the monstrous pelt of a lion.

The statue had been carved out of a single moment, the man’s shoulder length hair blowing wildly behind him. His head was tilted back, a savage grin carved into his lips. Twin jewels of cut and polished amethyst glimmered in place of eyes, narrowed in firm defiance.

The statue of the Champion held the other broken end of Prometheus’ chain in his right hand, and with his left he pointed a golden blade at the skies above. Of all the shameful, suffering souls that I had found within the storm, the immortal memory of Herakles alone stood defiant.

“Is it ivory or is it horn?” Prometheus whispered, and we couldn’t help but overhear him. “How long could it have possibly been? I feel as if I’ve only just closed my eyes, and yet…”

“And yet?” I called when the Titan trailed off, tearing my gaze away from the Champion’s statue. My heart stuttered in my chest and ice shot through my veins when I saw that the fingers of Prometheus’ right hand had parted, and he was staring down at us through the gap.

“And yet here you are already.”

“You know us?” Of all the myriad impossibilities, that one should have shocked me least. The Titan had clearly recognized Sol, or at least seemed to think he did before laying eyes on me. He’d seen my brother and expected me to be someone else.

“Of course I do. I must. It was my hand that molded you from clay, my hand that stole for you a spark.” The Titan was trying to convince himself as much as he was us. He sounded bewildered and fatigued. His free hand dragged down his face, smooth nails digging into his own flawless skin. “I may not be your Father, but you are my children all the same. I know you all. I carry you all with me, here.” His hand settled over his heart, and my own thrummed inside my chest like a struck gong.

Sol caught me by the shoulder and it was only then that I realized I had fallen. I staggered, fine hairs prickling on my skin and cold sweat dousing me like rain water. I cursed my sudden infirmity and forced pneuma through my legs to brace them.

Vital strength flooded my limbs and I nearly slammed my head into Sol’s chin as I exploded back to my feet. Sparks danced in my vision as I was all but overwhelmed by the sudden surge of vitality. My lungs felt overfull - no, not overfull. Overfull implied pain, implied a lack of space to hold my breath. This feeling wasn’t that. This was something pure. It felt as though my body was not my own, and yet more my own than it had ever been.

My breath flowed freely, utterly unobstructed. Like I’d been born anew.

“What was that?” Sol finally found his voice, and used it to demand answers of the Flame. “What did you do to us?” Us?

My nose wrinkled, and I looked down at myself in disgusted understanding. It wasn’t sweat that clung to my skin, but something fouler. A dark, vile substance that smelled awful in a hundred different ways and refused to part from my skin. I saw the same noxious liquid clinging to Sol’s exposed skin and seeping through his tunic, sticking to his face and neck like mud.

Scarlet flame rose up from my soul and scoured the taint from our skin. Sol tensed but allowed the flames to pass, grimacing at the fumes that rose up around us as it burned.

“Impurities,” I said roughly. Tracing my own pneuma as it flowed through my body, I realized it was more than that. “Our humors - he balanced us.”

My body felt more my own than it ever had before, and it was because an outside force had changed it.

“Why?” I asked.

Prometheus clenched his eyes shut, blocking out the light of the sun, and when he spoke his voice was distant. As if his mind was elsewhere, chained up just as his body was here. He shook his head.

“Why have I ever needed a reason? Some things exist apart from explanation. Some truths are plainly known.”

Lightning flashed overhead and the Titan Flame grit his gold-stained teeth in pained frustration.

“My children are freezing. My children are blind. What else was I to do?”

—

“The sun’s hot rays will scorch and age your youthful flesh.”

—

Hero of the Scything Squall, Scythas

“Join me. Quickly,” the Muse bid him, drawing back into her cage of stone sufferers. Scythas lurched after her on hands and knees into the cage. Moments later, he heard a crack and felt the heat of striking lightning behind him.

He turned and fell onto his back, clutching the alchemical furnace to his chest, and watched with wide eyes as a hound made entirely of lightning struck the stone cage and was torn apart. A shrill yelp was the last sound it ever made before dispersing into sparks.

“You-” Scythas choked and turned his head, coughing violently. He’d inhaled a strand of blood from his mangled tongue. Clearing his throat, he looked up through steaming eyes at the statue of the Muse.

“You saved me,” he croaked. “Thank you.”

The statue of the Muse tapped a stone finger on the crown of his head.

“I haven’t saved you yet,” Urania corrected him. “What brings you to this place?”

Scythas furrowed his brow. Not once since the day he’d advanced to the Heroic Realm had Urania asked him such a question. She always knew why he was where he was when he called upon her. She always knew exactly where he needed her to be.

“You don’t know?”

“The Urania that exists within you is a Urania beyond my time,” the statue of the Muse informed him, allowing her stone hand to trail down from the crown of his head, cupping his chin with care. “I can see her mark on your heart, and it tells me that you’re mine. But I can only guess as to why she chose you. And I can only help you if you tell me why you’re here - and what you need.”

There had been no response when he first called out to the Heavenly Muse, and Scythas realized this must be why. He’d thought that landing at the statue’s feet had been her way of answering, and perhaps it had - but it hadn’t been his Muse responding to the call. Not quite.

“Where is my Urania?” he asked. She shrugged, an uncanny shifting of stone that was made more bizarre by the fact that the carved silks were not silks at all. They did not shift with the motion the way they should have.

“With the rest of her sisters, I imagine,” Urania answered. She waved a hand vaguely at the world outside her cage. “Anywhere but here.”

Scythas caught himself before he could pursue that further, cursing his wandering mind. He didn’t have time for questions. Solus had entrusted him with something worth more than any answer the Muses could give him. Every moment Scythas spent here was another moment that the Gadfly could use to find him. Had he pursued Scythas into the storm at all? Had Solus gone in after him? Scythas didn’t know, and that was an inexcusable lack.

He had grown so accustomed to having the wind on his side that being here, cut off from the whispering breeze, left him feeling worse than blind.

“Can you guide me through the storm?” He asked the Heavenly Muse, and whether she was his or some other Urania from an age long past, she smiled just the same.

“Which path do you seek, young hero?”

“Socrates,” he said at once. “Show me the path to Socrates.” If he knew where the Gadfly was, he could go anywhere else to avoid him. The only thing keeping Scythas trapped inside the storm crown was the threat of the Scholar waiting for him just outside of it.

The statue paused, then shook her head.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” she said apologetically. “None that go by it exist within the storm. I can only guide you inside of its boundaries.”

Scythas sighed. It wasn’t the answer he wanted, but it was information nonetheless. Socrates hadn’t pursued him.

“Would you like to know who did?” Urania asked, reading his mind as she always did. Before Scythas could respond one way or another, she cast her hand out and splayed her fingers wide.

Starlight bloomed within the immortal storm crown.

Scythas traced seven distinct constellation lines, five branching along the mountain parallel with his elevation or beneath it. Two paths alone arched straight up towards the peak, so close they intertwined at points. His heart flew up into his throat.

“Who are they?”

The statue of the Muse considered him thoughtfully. “It seems you already know.”

He needed confirmation. “Show me Solus.”

Every constellation but one flickered and went out. The one that remained was one of the two that arched above their heads, leading to the peak.

“I'm going.” Though he dreaded even saying it, the Legate’s will was clear. Solus had decided that even the shadows beneath the storm crown were no longer entirely safe, and had sought refuge in the one place that even the Gadfly wouldn’t dare tread. If he could suffer the storm, his standing being what it was, then Scythas had no excuse at all. He forced himself up onto one knee.

“Why?” the statue of Urania asked him. He had to remind himself that it wasn’t a playful jab or an invitation to reconsider. This version of the Muse simply didn’t know.

He hefted up the stone furnace in lieu of a response, searching through the storm around them for hounds. There were none in sight for now. He could only hope the stars would guide him around them-

“You’re going to poison him?” Urania asked, and Scythas froze.

“What?”

“Or is he going to poison someone else?” the Muse murmured, tapping a stone finger to her chin in thought. “If that brew is meant for him, you should know that it’s entirely more than is required. You’d be wasting a maul on a mouse. There are easier ways-”

“No!” Scythas blurted. “No, I’m not- this isn’t-” He held the furnace up helplessly. “This is nectar.”

“It’s poison,” the Muse said simply, and Scythas couldn’t find any trace of mischief or lie in her stone face. He nearly dropped the furnace as he thrust it out as far as he could away from his face. How long had he been inhaling the fumes? How much damage had been done already?

“But that’s not…” Scythas clenched his eyes shut. His head was still pounding, worse now than before. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever made sense. “We followed the Gadfly’s instructions to the letter. He said he knew. He said he’d seen it done with his own eyes, brewed by the kyrios’ own hand. He said it would work! What are we going to do?”

Unbidden and against his will, images of his brother danced behind his eyelids.

What am I going to do?

Cool stone fingers gripped his chin again and lifted it. Scythas opened his eyes and through their blurry vision saw Urania’s kind eyes.

“I never said it was wrongly brewed,” she told him gently. “I only said that it was poison.”

“That’s not what it was meant to be!”

“Are you certain?”

Scythas was silent.

“The man that you call kyrios has had ages upon ages to grow desensitized to his own brew,” Urania explained. As she did she reached somehow into her stone robes, parting them like real silk as she searched through them. “Poison for thee, not for He. You did nothing wrong, but you lack the constitution required. An iron stomach is needed for a drink like this.”

From her robes, Urania drew out a wide-rimmed cup made entirely of polished pewter. A bright silvery skyphos, of the same make as the crown of stars upon her head.

“Whichever path you plan to follow, the storm will break you down. You must rest. You must regain your strength. Until then-” The muse withdrew her hand from his chin and cupped both palms beneath the wide pewter cup. She held it out and favored Scythas with a beautiful, dimpled smile. “Kind hero of my heart, won’t you offer me a drink?”

What else was he to do?

Scythas poured Urania a cup of blood-red poison from the furnace and watched her raise it to her lips, tipping it back and drinking it dry in one long pull.

He waited for her to say something, to wrinkle her nose in disgust or make a sound of some appreciation for the taste. Anything. Instead, the statue’s stone cheeks puffed out as she swished the poison back and forth in her mouth. Then she gave him a wink.

Urania spit their poison nectar back into her cup, and somehow, impossibly, what had gone in the color of spilled blood came out the color of liquid gold.

Scythas watched the glittering liquid fill her cup, entirely lost for words. When the Muse offered her skyphos back to him, he could only stare.

“The roads ahead of you are long,” spoke Urania of the Storm. “Drink of my drink, young Scythas, and be strong.”

“The day I met you,” Scythas eventually said, “you told me that you could only ever help me help myself. Show me the way, but never help me walk it.” Somehow, it was the first thing that came to mind.

“Then I lied to you,” the statue of the Muse said with regret. She didn’t take back her offered gift. Beyond their cage, the storm raged on.

Scythas took the pewter cup in hand.

—

For you, the sparkling stars high in the sky at night will hide those rays and offer some relief.

1.120 [KINDLE RELEASE IS LIVE]

MY FELLOW DEGENERATES.

VIRTUOUS SONS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE.

We made it, boys. Book one of Virtuous Sons has officially launched on Amazon and is available in ebook (for outright purchase or Kindle Unlimited) as well as paperback (pending Amazon's approval). In a couple weeks it will also be available in hardcover and audiobook, which is going to be exceptional.

I can’t thank you all enough for sticking with the story through all its myriad trials and tribulations, and I’m doubly thankful to all my patrons that have made it possible to pursue this as more than just an occasional hobby.

This book release covers the beginning of the story thru until the end of the Polyzalus interlude, and on top of the usual editing and polishing niceties that come with a published release, it also features some A+ chapter header art from the ever talented Hodge (the same author that converted chapter one of VS into a killer webtoon). I’m very pleased with how it all came together, and am already playing around with a few ideas to make the next release even better.

For those of you interested in picking up a copy, reviews on the Amazon page are worth their weight in gold - I’d be forever in your debt if you could drop a rating and a few words to let the Kindle masses know what you think of the story. And absolutely make sure to keep an eye out for the audiobook that’s coming out later this month. We got a fantastic ensemble cast for it and I think it all came together very well.

Pre-orders for the second book, The Tyrant Riot, are live as well. I’ve got some spicy ideas in mind for art and some other extras to slip into that one, so stay tuned.

Couldn’t have done it without you boys. Thank you.

And of course, as always, enjoy the chapter.

The Young Griffon

We sprang forth seven strong into the Storm That Never Ceased, and in seconds it divided us.

The roiling cloud cover was as oppressive to the senses as I remembered, the roar of thunder just as deafening and the lines of lightning wrath every bit as blinding. It was unchanged since the last time I had suffered it, and it staggered me in spite of that. Beside me, Sol ducked his chin and raised an arm against the storm, marching on without pause.

Our Heroic companions came rushing in behind us at speeds neither Sol nor I could ever hope to match. The storm did not hesitate to humble them. Lightning flashed in whipcrack strands and every one of the Heroes burnt their hearts’ blood in anticipation of a punishing blow.

Crackling hands of my violent intent slammed twenty blades of tribulation iron into the mountain path in a wide octagon around us. I had already begun drawing them from my shadow as soon as we took our first step into the chaos. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been nearly fast enough. The lightning changed its course and plunged through the blades, seeping into the mountain stone.

Distantly through the storm, I heard the thunder clap of barking hounds. When I looked back to our companions, just a couple steps behind Sol and I, the only portions of them visible through the storm were the flames behind their eyes.

My pankration hands wrenched free each of the blades I had stolen from the mountain and held them ready in the air.

“With me!” Sol commanded, and sprinted towards the braying hounds.

He did his best to hold us all together, as he always had, but Thracia had stolen from him the use of his virtue. Without it he lacked the means to truly guide his loyal toy soldiers. Instead, he began calling a cadence. He drew them into his rhythm and the riptide of his influence, a touchstone in the storm.

When a dog of the lightning wrath spring from the cloud cover and was intercepted by one of twenty tribulation blades, the reverberation of its impact scattered us worse than if the hound had found its mark.

A sound like a giant striking a gong and a tree splitting down its center rang out. Each of us was flung away from the blade, all in a different direction. I felt it as the storm consumed them all, and I cast out the hands of my intent. I reached out urgently, grasping for the arms-

Elissa flailed and met me with her blade, stabbing through my lightning palm. The tail of Kyno’s crocodile cloak whipped my reaching hand away. Lefteris flinched back, Jason twisted to avoid me, and Anastasia ignored the limb entirely in her attempt to re-orient herself midair.

Was it malice or a Hero’s simple instinct? Did the distinction matter in the end?

Now, as once before, the outcome was the same. Hurtling through the empty rage of the immortal storm crown, I might as well have been back in that worthless Scarlet Stadium.

Why wouldn’t they take my hand-?

A heavy hand struck out through the storm and latched onto my own, gripping it tight and pulling me back down to the earth. We hit the ground together and tumbled. My crackling pankration hands swarmed us, bracing against our momentum and pulling us to our feet.

Sol released my hand of flesh and blood and plucked a hand of my intent from the air.

“I’m keeping this,” he declared. Somehow I had to laugh.

We were only moments in and the storm had already divided us. I couldn’t detect a single one of our companions no matter how hard I strained my senses. In this place, it didn’t matter that they could have been a single bound away. The storm that separated us made it an unbridgeable gap. It was as if Sol and I were the only two left on the mountain. The only ones left on this earth.

So why was it that my heart was beating easier now than it had been before?

Why was it that I felt better about our chances as we resumed our march alone?

I pondered it as we climbed.

——————

“You never carved out a spirit block.”

The immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven Cult was a vicious opponent, even to those that had faced it once before. We took refuge from the storm whenever it was offered to us. At the moment, that was beneath a familiar stone statue.

Sol glanced sidelong at me, confused. There was blood on his face. The hounds hadn’t touched him, but they’d shattered mountain stone every time they struck and the flying shards had cut him.

“My what?”

“The blocks of marble I had you carting around,” I explained. “During the qualifying trials before the Rosy Dawn’s initiation.” He grunted, acknowledging the memory. “That wasn’t all for show, not entirely. Chiseling them was a test of skill. A measure of one’s self-awareness, their understanding of their own burgeoning myth.”

“And?” Sol asked knowingly. His eyes scanned the storm ahead. We had yet to reunite with any of the Heroes we had entered with, and we hadn’t found our wayward eighth either. We may have been close. There was no way to know.

“And,” I continued with a flourish of my pankration hands, brandishing all twenty of my stolen blades at the statue of Sisyphus we were crouching underneath. “The result was its own reward. A statue chiseled by your own pneuma, from a block of spirit marble, is a tether to your own refinement. It grows alongside you, refining itself in a direct reflection of your own progression.”

The Rosy Dawn dedicated entire temples to the keeping of such statues. As a child, I had wandered up and down those shadowed halls and marveled at the spirit marbles of those that came long before me. Immortalized in their final moments, standing strong and tall and proud.

“They serve as monuments to our journeys, no matter where the winds might take us. A piece that can be left behind.” I glanced up meaningfully. “A part of us preserved.”

The Twice-Killed Tyrant was as I had left him before, straining against his boulder’s weight and hunching down beneath the storm. Cowering at Raging Heaven‘s wrath.

“What a shame, Sisyphus,” I lamented. “Of all your triumphs and transgressions, this alone is what remains. You waited ‘til the very end to flinch.”

A lightning hound howled in the distance. Sol rose to his feet, gripping the same crackling hand of my intent like a tethering rope.

“We’re going.”

“If you were to chisel one out here and now, what sort of bearing would it take?” I asked him curiously, rising up as well. “What expression would you find on your face?”

“The same one as always,” the Roman said dryly. That storm flashed in his eyes, a mirror image of our surroundings. Somehow, I doubted that.

One of my twenty pankration hands spun its tribulation sword around and drove it into the Twice-Killed Tyrant’s back, returning it to its proper place. I spared Sisyphus one last glance before joining Sol on the path up to the peak.

——————

Scythas commanded the breeze that carried every spoken word in the Raging Heaven Cult, but that unique ability ended where the storm crown began. No matter how many times Sol and I called out his name, we never received a response.

Though we didn’t find any of what we sought, we were found often enough.

Standing back-to-back in a narrow cage made of stolen iron swords, Sol and I gasped for breath while another manifestation of tribulation lightning yelped and howled and was torn apart – dispersed amongst the blades. Returned to the earth. It wasn’t the first dog that had found us, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. The longer we spent in this story, the less likely it became that we’d escape it.

Between panting breaths, I knocked my head back against Sol’s.

“I have an idea, slave.”

Sol snorted. “I’m not your slave.”

“You were my slave,” I pointed out. “And I’m feeling nostalgic. Humor me.”

“No.”

“Thank you. My idea is thus: we right the wrongs the Rosy Dawn did unto you and give you a proper marker of your refinement. We carve it here and now. Something that will endure no matter where your journey takes you - a statue worth admiring, even if its subject is a Roman.”

He sighed. “This again.”

The Roman had his bronze spear in hand, the one we’d taken from the temple of the Father. When another point of light appeared amidst the storm clouds, a static growl betraying its true nature, he didn’t wait for it to test the limits of my cage again. He reared back and heaved his spear through the gap between two swords and struck the hound between the eyes as it leapt forward.

The tribulation hound exploded, like it had been struck by a ballista more than any mortal man’s projectile. A hand of my intent darted out past the cage and caught the spear before it could fly off into the distance and be lost forever, returning it to Sol. He had lost his virtue’s invisible touch during our time in Thracia, but he’d gained something else in exchange. He moved with a weight far beyond the limits of his frame now.

“We have no time,” he said, accepting his spear when I offered it back and stepping past the safety of the cage. We continued on, retracing steps that I had walked months before.

“We are cultivators. We have nothing but time.”

“I have no interest,” Sol corrected himself.

“I’ll join you,” I offered.

Through flashing lights and rolling thunder, the Roman glanced sidelong at me in vague disgust.

“I don’t want your hands chiseling any part of me from marble.”

“Worthless Roman, I’ll carve my own. We’ll stand together through the storm.”

“One immortal vanity isn’t enough for you?”

I smiled faintly, gathering my blades around us as another howl rose up from the east.

“I never said I had one either.”

——————

“It occurs to me,” I said, a few minutes or perhaps a lifetime later, “that we might have been better off waiting outside the storm for Scythas to emerge.”

“Likely.”

We crept like hunting cats along an overhang that looked down over a pack of hunting hounds. Their lightning hides stood out brightly in the storm. Sol gripped his bronze spear in one hand and one of my stolen tribulation swords in the other. Lacking a third to keep hold of his tether to me, he instead held my lightning limb between his teeth. It gave the impression of a constant snarl.

Aside from freeing up his second hand for a blade, it also gave him an excuse to only speak to me in single word increments - if at all. Between the former and the latter, I suspected I knew which had been the more enticing factor.

“It’s not too late to double back,” I said. It would be treacherous no matter what, but we could make it back down.

Seeking out something within the storm crown was an all but fruitless effort, but that did not mean it was impossible to navigate it. No matter how the Storm That Never Ceased sought to addle your senses, it could not move the axis of the world. The crown atop the mountain was only that - a crown. It could not change the nature of the mountain.

Regardless of the path we took, descending down the mountain would lead us back to the Raging Heaven Cult. Scythas knew that fact as well as we did.

Sol shook his head and continued on. I chuckled and raised my hands in acquiescence.

Of course, the opposite was also true. No matter how long it took us or which mangled paths we were forced to take, our destination was equally assured.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. We were finally of one mind.

So long as we kept climbing, we were bound to reach the peak.

——————

We fought tooth and nail for every step, and the storm crown pressed back harder the higher up we went. By the time we reached the point where I had been forced to turn back alone, we were both a mess of blood and lightning burns. It had been a small eternity since we’d seen another tribulation statue. An untraceable amount of time since we’d had a moment’s rest.

“Tell me something, slave,” I said, and only just dove out of the way in time to avoid the lashing of my own blade. Sol didn’t say a word, but he bit down harder on the lightning limb between his teeth and the pain of it was clear enough. I grinned viciously back at him and posed another question.

“Why don’t we kill the higher powers?”

Lightning screamed down from heaven and struck my risen blades. Sol eyed me. I took it as the invitation it was.

“Before the Scholar and before the Conqueror, how did we cultivate virtue? How did a lowly man refine himself before the ages of philosophers and tyrants?”

“Labors,” the son of Rome spoke through a mouthful of lightning.

“Labors,” I agreed. “The Champion’s path is the eldest and most vibrant of the three. But even Herakles was laid low in the end.”

The mountain became steep, too steep to walk, and so I took a sword in each hand and stabbed them like ice picks into the face of the mountain as I climbed. Beside me, Sol did the same with sword and spear.

“Ten labors he suffered,” I continued, pulling myself up higher every hand. “Ten steps up the stairway to promised heaven, and each of them he overcame. And what was handed down from Heaven when the final labor was complete? What was his reward for ten?”

Sol’s answer was grim.

“Eleven.”

The Champion was the pinnacle, the gleaming standard that bright-eyed children in every corner of the Free Mediterranean dreamed of one day standing eye-to-eye with. In many ways, Herakles was the embodiment of the Hero’s journey. He was the flame. He was the glory.

He was the reason there were ten steps in every realm. Because he had suffered ten labors, ten steps on the path to heaven, and he had mastered every one.

“Eleven,” I agreed, and lurched another blade length up the sheer face of Kaukoso Mons. “The cultivator refined himself ten times, and instead of providence he was given an eleventh step to climb. It was the eleventh step that killed him. It was not the Champion’s side of the bargain that was unfulfilled, not a lack of virtue in his heart to blame.”

Ten labors. Ten steps to the peak. That had been the deal, the bargain struck with the Heavens.

“The reward for ten labors is an eleventh,” I ground out. “The reward for escaping the first realm is the burden of the second.”

Sol stopped climbing for just a moment and hung from his spear alone, just long enough to take the lightning hand out of his mouth and speak.

“What’s your point?”

“Longevity is a curse upon the younger generation. In this tarnished era just as it was in the Golden Age of Heroes, Herakles labored under the Mother’s yoke and our Heroes suffer under the thumbs of Tyrants. And for what? Nothing has changed. Our ancestors have erected monuments to reason and to greed, built new labyrinths for their children when they should have been fashioning strings to guide them through instead, and still we’re not any of us closer to heaven!”

I slammed my knee against the face of Kaukoso Mons and focused on the silver-bright sensation of pain over the cratering of the stone.

“The son is not beholden to the father for the simple fact that he was born,” I said fiercely, daring him to deny me. “We are not obliged to kneel and press our faces to the dirt so our fathers can stand proud upon our backs!”

How did you climb the path to heaven when it was only one man wide? I’d asked Lefteris’ boys that question once, on the stairway to raging heaven, and the little king had put to words my sentiment.

"You step over top. On the shoulders of the men who came before you."

Those words still rang true in my heart. In a righteous world, they would be true.

This was not a righteous world.

I kept climbing, leaving Sol behind, and my voice challenged the storm crown’s roaring thunder.

“Providence is not a consequence of age. A crown is only as worthy as the man that wears it, and these kings and queens, these higher powers - they are not worthy! We can disanoint them. We can take their crowns.”

My impromptu ice pick stabbed into the open air, and I heaved myself up over the lip with the hands of my intent.

Twin hounds of lightning wrath bared their teeth at me, close enough to count their flickering fangs. The hound on the left barked, a thunder clap that nearly pushed me back over the edge of the sheer wall I’d just crested. I sneered. I’d had enough of barking dogs.

When Sol finally caught up, heaving his ridiculous weight up onto the ledge, I was sitting in a crater with my hands half clenched. The muscles spasmed against my will, fingers curling and uncurling as lightning fought to overcome my body’s will. Grasping lightning in your hand was a mad venture every time, and I felt the fruits of that madness keenly. But the hounds were dead, and I was not.

“Why should we appeal to higher power when it’s higher power that’s to blame?” I asked the Roman frankly. “Our companions are battered and beaten down because the Tyrants of this world would rather see their children buried than pass along their crowns. They deserve worse than all that they’ve inflicted, more than the lightning that is cast down on their heads. They deserve true justice. They deserve tribulation.”

I might as well have been talking to the wind. The son of Rome was as loyal as a dog to the men that had so half-heartedly raised him, up to and beyond his own detriment. He’d sooner throw himself into the flame than hold his father to its coals. Worthless, filial-

Sol nodded once, and spoke through teeth clenched tightly over lightning.

“Agreed.”

——————

Something had changed in the Roman. I hadn’t noticed it in the chaos preceding our ascent, but the more I looked the clearer I saw it. He was as laconic as he’d ever been. The storm in his eyes hadn’t changed.

And yet.

——————

The initiation rites of the Raging Heaven Cult were not at all like those of the Rosy Dawn. If pressed, I’d guess that they weren’t like any other mystery cult’s on this earth. They could hardly be called initiation rites at all. They were not designed to welcome new initiates into the fold.

The rites existed only to break them.

I had traversed the storm alone my first time and gone further than most before turning, but it had been so long since Sol and I had passed that marker that my past performance seemed like nothing but a poor joke now. It felt like we would never reach the peak.

Though I had that thought a hundred times, somehow it never brought my spirits down. Despite the overpowering fatigue and the weight of all our wounds, the steps never got any heavier. If anything, my feet felt lighter as we climbed. We could have been walking for years, and yet it felt like no time at all had passed.

When Sol dropped his sword and his spear and fell to his knees, I thought for a moment that I had imagined that feeling, and that the fatigue would come crashing down on me in the next moment. But it wasn’t weariness that had brought the Roman down.

I crouched beside him and joined him in staring at a thin stream of liquid lead as it rolled down the mountain.

“Prima materia,” Sol named it, taking the lightning limb out of his mouth.

“The first material,” I mused, dipping the tips of my fingers to it and raising them up. The unnatural smell of it, sharp and brittle as it wound down my throat, invoked a memory that wasn’t my own. The drakaina that my father and my uncles had fought as captains of the Sophic Realm, the monstrous serpent women cursed to wander the earth forever undying, had bled a substance just like this.

Aristotle had named it ichor.

“Every year that Bakkhos conducted the rites, he’d offer a cup of nectar to any that could reach the top and bring back proof of their passing,” Sol explained quietly, eyes flickering to the side. There. Another hair-thin trail a foot away, at the edge of our visible range. “When the initiates failed, he’d offer the Elders the same opportunity. They refused, always. This is what he’d bring back down in their stead. A cup of liquid lead. This is the proof.”

His brow drew down. I followed the trail of liquid up until I could trace it no further from where we crouched. I frowned.

“We could fill a cup from here,” I said. “It wouldn’t be proof of anything. We aren’t at the peak.”

“He lied,” Sol said, disgusted.

“Bakkhos or the old man?”

“Either of them. Both of them.” Sol spat and rose to his feet. “Whatever the truth is, it’s up there.”

I stood and stretched my arms high above my head. Liars and Tyrants and poisonous wine. I tilted my head to regard the Roman, grinning boyishly.

“Race you.”

I took off in a dead sprint up the mountain, feet splashing through the thickening trails of liquid lead. The stone shook beneath my feet as Sol raced after me.

This world was tarnished iron, less than it should ever be. That had enraged me in the city of Olympia, maddened me in the Orphic House, but the more it discontented me the more I wanted to know. I’d gone all my life without a drop of water on my tongue, and the first cup I’d been handed upon escaping from my father’s domain had been full to the brim with seawater.

The more I drank of this world, the less that I was sated. There was a void in my existence, a lack that my soul could not withstand forever. That my virtuous heart would not tolerate. Venturing to Olympia had only made that empty hunger more pronounced.

So why was it that here and now, I couldn’t feel that gnawing lack at all? In this raging storm of immortal tribulation, where the brightest spirits of the Raging Heaven were broken and discarded every year. Where Tyrants feared to look, let alone tread? Why did I feel at ease marching through the worst of Raging Heaven, so long as Sol was by my side?

Up above me, like the parting of seas, I saw the clouds begin to thin. I realized I was laughing.

Sol appeared beside me and we plunged through the gossamer veil together, out of the mayhem and into the eye of the storm. The peak of Kaukoso Mons.

I looked up and saw-

——————

To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak.

[          ]

Faceless wretch of silver Heaven.

[          ]

Traitor to your sons and brothers.

[          ]

Titan of the molded clay.

[          ]

Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from-

——————

“Prometheus,” I breathed, grinding to a halt. Sol staggered forward a step and planted his spearhead in the stone to brace himself.

“Here?” Sol stared up in baffled disbelief. “He’s not supposed to be here.”

“He’s not supposed to have a name, either,” I said faintly.

Or a face.

Chained to the peak of Kaukoso Mons by chains of swaying adamant, Prometheus the Flame hung limp. Like a man writ larger than any king or god. Like a living constellation. A myth made manifest. How had I forgotten his name?

The Titan’s eyes opened, and each one was a burning sun.

1.119 [An Unkindness]

BIG thanks to Pineapple_Hugs and Lungs for helping edit this one after writing it fried my brain. Enjoy.

“A raven carries tribulation in its talons. It has ever been so, since the last of the bright birds brought the sun god word of his lover’s infidelity and were scorched black by his grief.

“One midnight messenger is tragedy enough. Any more than that is nothing but a curse. After a certain point, a pile of tragedies becomes its own cruel comedy.

“A gathering of ravens is nothing less than-”

An Unkindness

The city of Olympia, known to some as the Sanctuary and others as the Half-Step, is stirring from its four year slumber. The one hundred and ninety-ninth Olympic Games are in their starting motions.

The final day has come for the competitors to stake their claims on the chance to compete for Olympic glory. The sun is risen, and once it falls in fullness into night, the gates of the Olympic Stadium will close. Any would-be champions still outside of it after that point will have to wait another four years to try again.

Once this final night falls, the Heroes of the one hundred and ninety-ninth Olympic Games will spend a month in the shadow of the Champions that came before them. Thirty days and thirty nights they will spend in the pit, readying themselves however they can for the bouts that lay ahead.

There are ten events in total, each of them with its own gauntlet of heats and elimination brackets. Three sets of three, and one above the rest.

The marathon, first and most beloved of the games, is a journey around the stadium track that can and has killed those that strove to conquer it in the past. After that will come the sprints, where the distance between triumph and defeat is, at times, measured by the width of a single hair. The chariot races are third and final of the lot, and perhaps the most exciting of the three.

After the races come the tests of skill and precision. The discus, the javelin, and the ball. Distance and finesse are required in equal measures to prevail in any of the three.

The martial games require no explanation. Wrestling, boxing, and the blade each speak for themselves.

And of course, standing above them all is the king of close quarters. Pankration.

In just one more month, the names of an era will all be gathered in the city of Olympia to see the crowning of new glory. Over these next thirty days, the citizens of the city will revel in the attention of the Free Mediterranean. The aristocrats and scholars of mystery faith will join them in their anticipation and their festivals, and the far-flung dignitaries from the furthest reaches of the world will stage their own unofficial competition - a competition to see which of their relics and exotic treasures is most impressive to the sons and daughters of Greece.

Starting tonight, every day for the next thirty days will be a grand celebration.

At the end of the month, the stadium gates will open to those afforded a seat. The Olympic Flame will be lit up in the First Champion’s marble heart, and by its light the best athletes of the era will compete for one of only ten Olympic olive crowns.

If, and only if, one among them defies every expectation, takes every single glory for themselves, the Half-Step City will be made witness to something far greater than a ceremony of mortal honors.

If one amongst the lot can do the work of ten, the free world will be graced by the birth of a new Champion.

——————————

West of Olympia and across the Ionian, the Rosy Dawn Cult of Greater Mysteries is coming alive in a very different way. Rather than the rekindling of a dormant flame, this is more like the agitation of a colossal hive of bees.

When the Young Miss comes sprinting up the brick road that connects the Rosy Dawn to the Scarlet City in the valley below, she draws more than a few curious eyes. When she barrels through any initiate that dares to be standing in her way, it strikes the hearts of all those around her with alarm. The Young Miss is infamously frigid towards the less sensible men of the cult, but even after the Young Aristocrat’s mad flight from the city she has never been cruel. That she runs into them at all is a sign of uncommon thoughtlessness. That she doesn’t stop to help them to their feet is entirely unlike her.

When Chryse Aetos’ eldest daughter sprints the full distance of the Rosy Dawn’s estates and leaps without hesitation off the other side of the eastern mountain range, her fellow mystikos have no choice but to follow her.

The spectacle draws even the eyes of a few of the cult’s own Philosophers, scholars granted a place of prominence within the cult similar to the Young Miss’ own. But though a few of them order their nearby juniors to accompany the Young Miss in whatever she’s pursuing, none of them care urgently enough to follow her themselves.

Only minutes later, they feel the sting of fierce regret when the fastest of the mystikos to follow Lydia Aetos over the edge come scrambling back up the mountain screaming themselves hoarse.

“The Young Miss has gone mad! Lydia Aetos has consigned herself to the sea!”

Her grief has been known to them all from the moment the Young Aristocrat deserted his family and left the girl behind. But grief is one thing. This? This is entirely another.

The scholars cast aside their tablets and scrolls while the warriors sheathe their blades and spring from their sparring circles. Soon enough, the entire sprawling network of estates are in an uproar. Slaves, citizens, and philosophers alike are caught up in the press. Most race down to the beaches and leap into the waves to search for the Young Miss. Others make for the city. Some retreat into tight corners and huddled groups within the halls, whispering amongst themselves about what has happened and what is to come.

What will become of the Young Miss, and perhaps more importantly - no, without a doubt more importantly, what will become of them when the eastern mountain range cracks open once again?

What are they to do when Fotios and Chryse Aetos emerge from behind closed doors and discover their daughter had taken her own life?

They receive an omen of that ill fate when the Young Miss’ brother and sister are drawn out of their rooms.

The young men and women of the cult that are gathered at the docks, those unable or unwilling to dive into the Ionian themselves, can only turn their heads away to hide their own helpless tears while a young Rena Aetos collapses to her knees at the edge of the beach and wails in abject despair.

When the flighty middle child of Fotios’ trio of children discovers what’s taken place, he goes searching through the cult. And when he finds what he’s looking for, a wise man in the realm of philosophers, he asks him if he’d seen his sister crest the mountain. His eyes are not wet with tears when he does it. He is not weak with grief like his younger sister.

However, when the honored philosopher admits to seeing her pass, and upon further prompting admits he’d sent his students after the Young Miss rather than disrupt his work to follow her himself, the fair and flighty Castor draws his blade and runs the wise man’s writing hand through. When the philosopher screams and tumbles off his seat, turning tail and running from his junior, Fotios’ fairweather son vaults the marble bench and pursues him. Shouting obscenities all the while.

No matter how hard the elders of the cult try to get through to those behind closed doors, they cannot budge the mountain stone nor pierce it with their cries. The pillars of the Aetos’ family, along with their nephew and his guests, might as well be in another world entirely. Once sealed beneath the eastern mountain range, no one but the kyrios can hope to disrupt them. Alas, Damon Aetos was the first of them to close his doors.

The chaos spreads down either side of the mountain, spilling out over the beaches and fields as well as the Scarlet City itself. The elder philosophers are forced to split their attention between scouring the Ionian for the Young Miss and managing the chaos atop the mountain. They hardly have time to address the people of the city. In the Rosy Dawn’s absence, the Burning Dusk sends its own cultivators down to appease the citizenry.

It is almost a cruelty when the mountain heart cracks open in the Rosy Dawn’s central pavilion, and Nikolas Aetos comes marching out along with his aunts and uncles and Heroic companions.

They could have remained down there for weeks longer, if not months. Yet they emerge at the peak of the hysteria. Soon enough after the incident that Heron Aetos is still breathless from his race down and back from the beaches when he explains it to them in a rush. Soon enough that Rena Aetos is still sobbing fresh tears while her senior sisters try and fail to comfort her. Soon enough that Castor Aetos still has breath left in his lungs and heat left in his heart to chase the Sophic bystanders through the Rosy Dawn’s estates, bleeding them with his blade and battering their egos.

The pillars emerge sooner than any of them had expected.

But too late all the same.

Every awoken soul on the island feels it when Lydia’s parents are told the news. The sensation is muted by the Tyrant’s hand, its full impact mitigated such that it only knocks them off their feet and sears their eyes blind for a moment.

They feel it once again when Stavros and Raisa Aetos discover their youngest son is nowhere to be found.

———————-

The Hero of the Scything Squall is first to answer the call.

The initiates of the Howling Wind Cult have always skirted the line of the Father’s first and firmest mandate. Every cultivator knows the heavens are off-limits to a mortal man, no matter his allegiance. Flight is the providence of gods and beasts alone. The sons and daughters of the Hurricane Heights understand this, and so they do everything they can to defy this divine mandate without drawing tribulation’s eye.

The greatest of them are successful. For a time. The Hero of the Scything Squall is one of their best, but he has no illusions as to his ultimate fate. Lightning clips every wing eventually.

But for now, he soars.

Scythas races over top of the Half-Step City like each tiled roof is a stepping stone, and as though the vast distances between them are each a short hop along a river path. Every leap forward lasts longer than it should, the winds carry him higher and cradle him at the apex of every jump, and every time they hold him as long as they possibly can before letting him fall again.

The Gadfly had flung himself up over the city, as if fired from a war machine, the day he’d called their band of midnight marauders out as they were exiting a bath. What Scythas does now is every bit as belligerent. He glides upon the winds, and in this way pursues the eagle of Rome.

It occurs to him, as he lands on the twenty first step of the stairway to heaven and braces his weight on the stone, that he hasn’t set foot on Kaukoso Mons without a veil since the day he gave himself up to Solus. For a fraction of an instant he considers this, taking the time to coax a veil around himself, and slows down enough to maintain it.

The breeze carries the sounds of a Roman’s struggle to him and he explodes up the stairway and passes the pair of philosophers guarding the entrance to the Raging Heaven cult.

He can’t feel the weight of a Tyrant’s gaze the way that Solus can, but he can see the hurricane hierophant’s reaction to his arrival in the raising of his banners as he passes.

Up and down the portion of the mountain carved out for the Howling Wind cult’s faction are dozens upon dozens of vibrant green banners. They’re mounted to standing poles, they dangle from the tassels of enormous wind chimes, and proudly wave atop every home in Aleuas’ estate. As Scythas surges by them, his passing threatens to tear every banner out of its place, whipping them around in a frenzy.

When in the next instant every banner smooths and billows out in his direction, tracking him as he ascends, Scythas knows the hurricane hierophant is behind them. When the Tyrant himself calls out his name, the winds that carry it are frantic. He knows he must stop or face his father-in-law’s wrath later.

But by the time his juniors sweep out of their quarters in pursuit of him, he is already beyond the Tyrant’s reach.

Scythas reaches the precipice before the storm crown just in time to see Sorea dive into a cave with talons outstretched. He follows the bird and has only a moment to process the scene inside.

The Scholar, Socrates of Brazen Aegis and Broken Tide, backhands the virtuous beast out of the air and sends the eagle shooting back out of the cave mouth. There are lines of blood left on his forearm and hand left by the eagle’s talons, but they are little more than an annoyance.

The Gadfly’s other hand holds Solus up by his neck, each finger an immovable vise around the Roman’s throat. The muscles of the arm that holds the Roman up are strained to the limit, veins pressing up against the old man’s newly transplanted skin like they want to tear themselves out. Like Socrates is holding up the weight of the world with one hand.

Both of them are bruised and bloody. In that frozen moment, Scythas can only guess as to how the two had come to blows. He can only marvel at the fact that Solus hasn’t torn the whole mountain apart in his wrath. He wonders at that moment why the Legate is still holding back. Even here, in a cave that no Elder can perceive beneath the storm that never ceases.

Then he sees the stone furnace. He understands.

The wind carries him forward, into the reach of the man that the coast could not kill. The Gadfly turns a baleful glare upon Scythas, the full enormity of his influence rising like a thousand screaming voices in the agora. Terror urges the wind to change - to halt his momentum and toss him back, to deliver him from this certain death.

Scythas whistles a note so loud and shrill it could have shattered glass and whips his sword out of its sheath in a crescent arc that ends at a point beyond the Scholar’s neck.

Socrates strikes him with one thousand unspoken truths, and Scythas’ eyes blaze as he burns his heart’s blood and cuts through them all. His blade acts as a conduit for the tragedy of his ascension. It cuts through everything it touches like so much worthless chaff. Like a scythe-

At the last moment, the Gadfly leans back to avoid the scything blade. Before Scythas can arrest his own movements, the old wiseman reaches for him.

Sol snarls and brings both feet up against the Gadfly’s chest, kicking off-

Scythas hits the cave floor and tumbles once before slamming into the far wall. Bleary understanding returns to him along with his vision - Socrates had abandoned his attempt to snatch him out of the air when Solus capitalized on the imbalance in his stance from leaning back. Instead, the Gadfly had only backhanded Scythas into the ground like an unruly slave.

Though his vision is still a blur, and the axes of the world are tilting all around him, the hero of the scything squall forces himself up onto hands and knees, while the Gadfly stomps the Legate through stone.

“Patience!” the Gadfly roars, his lips pulled back from his teeth in fury. He stomps Solus deeper into the stone floor of the cave. “All I’ve asked of you, all that I have ever asked of you, is for you to be patient! Not forever. Not even for long. Arrogant child, the world will not end if you give it time to breathe.”

Though every stomp of the old man’s filthy, calloused foot drives him deeper into a living grave of stone, Solus suffers the indignity without lashing out in return. And Scythas knows exactly why. There is something worth more to the Roman than his pride in this cave. There is something he can’t afford to destroy in his anger.

A basin full of blood red liquid, bubbling over a steady flame. A basin that was now closer to Scythas than it was the two of them.

His senses are still shaken by the blow, but when the breeze delivers to his ear the Legate’s rasping command, Scythas doesn’t hesitate.

“Take it.”

He lunges across the cave and snatches up the stone furnace with its nectar. The Scholar’s fingertips brush against his trailing silks as he spirals past, and then Scythas is out in the open air again.

“Don’t!” Socrates shouts.

Scythas races away while the world spins wildly around him. By the time he realizes which direction he’s headed, it’s already too late to change course. The wall of thunderous noise and lightning shocks him to his senses as Scythas plunges up into the storm crown. He has a moment to plant his feet, a moment to gather himself and begin to turn back.

Then the Gadfly’s hand punches through the storm wall, grasping for him, and Scythas escapes the only way he can.

By plunging deeper into the storm.

——————

The other five Heroes marked by the raven’s wings make it halfway across the city before Scythas disappears from their view overhead. Without the wind to guide them, none of them knows where Solus actually is on Kaukoso Mons. When they turn to the young Griffon to ask him, they find he’s not among their number anymore. Each of them digs in their heels, casting around for the scarlet son.

They’ve just started debating going back versus continuing towards the mountain when Griffon shoots over their heads, racing along balconies and rope-strung banners put up for the first of thirty evening festivals to come. Five heroic cultivators trade startled looks and leap up after him, tapping into as much of their potent penuma as they can without breaking the city around them.

They race past the young Griffon in no time at all.

“What are you waiting for!?” Jason shouts back at him. “A second note written in his blood!? Hurry up!”

The young Griffon ignores him, scarlet eyes set on the distant pillar of the storm crown as he runs.

“You can’t be serious,” Elissa says, understanding and profound irritation wrinkling the scars on her face. “Even now?”

“Solus needs you,” Anastasia urges him, her glossy black hair whipping in the wind behind her as she runs. “Just this once, just until we know what’s happened, surely he wouldn’t begrudge you a moment of the truth!”

Each of the five heroic souls urge him to keep up, to run faster than any mortal can. To at last reveal his true self and let his heroic heart flame burn.

The young Griffon runs without slowing, but neither does he speed up to match their pace. His eyes never stray from the peak of the raging Heaven cult.

When he speaks, his voice is deathly serious.

“I am what I am.”

No matter how much they press him after that, no matter how many times they call him a liar, he doesn’t say another word.

They make good time, but every one of the five knows they could have made it there faster if he’d only stopped pretending he was a philosopher for a moment when it counted.

If only, just for a moment, the young Griffon had been truthful, each of them is certain as stone that they would have made it before everything fell apart.

———————

The raven’s unlikely alliance boils up the mountain in the wake of the scything squall’s passing. The portions of the mountain not maintained by a living Tyrant’s will are ravaged by his passing. The winds tear trees out by their roots, rip the tiles off the roofs of the communal buildings closest to the path, and send dozens of Raging Heaven initiates tumbling nearly clear off the mountain.

It is a hero’s privilege to come and go and do as they please, but this is a special brand of disregard. Cultivators bearing the mark of Howling Wind stream up the mountain first. But not far behind are members of the Broken Tide, Waning Wax, and Scattered Foam.

In crowds of green, blue, yellow, and fuschia, philosophers race up the mountain to see what has been done. The commands of their elders drive them forward. Whatever is happening, it is happening out of their sight. For those with a vested interest in the actions of the raven, this is unacceptable.

They are not the only ones to send forth prying eyes. Members of the Raging Heaven with no ties to any of the other factions pour out onto the path in bewilderment as their peers race by. And although the sun is risen, the shadows in the groves and mountain crevices are alive with the shifting cloaks of crows.

No one knows what the hero of the scything squall was chasing. Everyone has their own idea of what it could be.

Not one of them is even close.

It’s only natural that a gathering of four factions would draw the attention of the other four on the mountain. It’s even more natural that a gathering of so many prideful cultivators from opposing cities, such a riotous confluence of cultivators that have spent the last several months of their lives jumping at every shadow, would collide at the slightest provocation.

It hardly takes a spark. Some of them trip and stumble as they scramble for the peak. Some are shoved while others are plainly insulted in the mayhem of the press. Spit in the face of a rival, blood in a junior’s mouth.

Up and down the mountain paths carved into Kaukoso mons, in pockets of two and three that spread like runaway flames, the crowds pursuing the hero of the scything squall devolve into brawls that spill over the primary paths and into the groves, the bath houses, and even the quarters of those not yet involved.

Elders with heroes at hand send them out to put the riot to rest. At first, it seems like it will work. After all, even an army of philosophers would be nothing to a single determined hero. They pierce through the crowds with ease and break up fights without fear of harm, scattering and reforming crowds like happy hounds.

This lasts all the way until a heroine from the Brazen Aegis takes issue with the force a hero from the Broken Tide uses to break up a dispute involving her juniors.

The words exchanged are short and ugly. The heroic souls were each born of the coast, but on opposing sides. They hate each other more than any other faction possibly could. When they clash, there is no higher power present to break their fight apart.

The amethyst veins that wind throughout the mountain burn brighter than a flame.

———————-

The Gadfly hurls Solus so viciously from the cave that if he had been a normal weight, he would have flown clear off the side of the mountain. As it is, he drops like a boulder and crashes through the mountain path like it’s finely ground sand.

The rosy hands of dawn halt him in his tracks. The son of Rome hacks and spits bloody phlegm and glares up the mountain with bloodshot eyes.

Five heroic cultivators fan out around him, the young Griffon a bracing hand at his back. They stand wary but as one while the Gadfly stalks down the mountain.

He stops ten feet short of them, matching Solus glare for glare. Then, without breaking that contact, he addresses the six behind the son of Rome.

“Have any of you ever been to war? Step forward if so.”

Sol bares his teeth in naked defiance and forces himself to one knee. Pankration hands grip his shoulders tightly. Griffon looms behind his back, holding him steady.

Above their heads, the immortal storm crown rages.

Only one of them steps forward. Anastasia holds her head high.

Socrates raises his eyes from Sol’s for just a moment, meeting the caustic queen’s gaze. There is no visible change. No clash of pneuma that any of them can feel. The heroine’s legs simply give way and send her to her knees. Her eyes fly open like a cornered cat’s.

The Gadfly turns his glare back on Solus, and goes on.

“There are evils in this world,” he says with quiet anger. “Demons in the hearts of every man. We pursue excellence within ourselves to overcome those evils. We strive to better the worlds within ourselves, to battle those demons in our hearts, so that we can do the same for the world outside ourselves.

“For a time, we’ve managed that. For centuries before any one of you were born, we have been at peace. But do not for a second think that we have won.”

Socrates steps forward and Anastasia flinches back from him. He doesn’t spare her a glance. His eyes remain locked on Solus’.

“You have not seen the evils that result when Tyrants go to war,” he asserts. “You think that you can fathom it but you can not. The suggestion of it would turn your legs to mush. It would bring tears to your eyes. As it should.”

The Gadfly finally breaks his glare with the Son of Rome, ceasing his onslaught of the same lived experience that had driven the Heroine to her knees. His eyes turn away in disgust.

“Only one of you has any idea at all what could come of this crisis of succession and it’s the one railing hardest against the efforts of his elders - the one among you with least of all to lose.”

“I’m trying to fix this,” Solus says in a voice like salted gravel.

“The brew is bad.” The philosopher sounds almost tired. “I don’t know where we erred, but it hardly matters now. Polyzalus wouldn’t let it touch his wife’s lips even if it was good. A dozen times I’ve tried to convince him and a dozen times I’ve been denied. He doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust you. A thousand cups of nectar won’t change that. I’ve told you this again and again, and yet still you refuse to listen.”

“You told the girl you had a cure,” Griffon accuses.

“I was wrong. I lied. Pick whichever suits you best.”

The Gadfly steps past them, down the mountain, and in moments he is gone.

Solus rises slowly to his feet. An eagle’s weak cry completes the image, and Sorea swoops down on unsteady wings to land upon his shoulder. The virtuous beast’s talons scrape against his bronze breastplate as the wounded eagle fights for purchase. Solus steadies the bird with one hand and reaches down to Anastasia with the other, pulling the Heroine to her feet when she takes it.

“Solus,” Jason ventures first. “What-?”

The Son of Rome cuts him short.

“Scythas has the nectar.”

He looks back and Griffon sees that storm there in his eyes.

“Where?” Kyno asks, though all of them suspect already.

Two lowly sophists and five Heroic souls plunge up into the mystery phenomenon of the Raging Heaven’s immortal storm crown, in search of their wayward eighth and the bounty in his stolen furnace.

A cup of scarlet glory.

1.118

The Son of Rome

“There are four stages to this synthesis. Four that I’ve observed, at any rate - four phases that the kyrios could compress into a single pour. We’ll have to use a furnace.”

Socrates hadn’t wasted a moment. As soon as I’d surrendered the golden cup of wine to him, he’d pulled a squat stone furnace from a fold within his rags and heaved it down over an open flame.

“Greater men than you and I have tried and failed to make reason of this drink. The kyrios shared it only sparingly, and those he shared it with could hardly be counted on to pull a list of ingredients from their experiences. If such a list did exist, he likely took it with him to the Underworld. We venture now into uncharted waters.”

The man they called the Scholar had spent years in the Half-Step City, serving as the Tyrant Riot’s personal advisor - for whatever that position was worth to a man like Bakkhos. From what I’d come to learn of the man, it seemed more likely that he enjoyed Socrates’ company and kept the philosopher around for his own amusement rather than any desire for advice. Regardless of the reason, Socrates had enjoyed a place of prominence in the mad king’s court for decades.

He’d seen Bakkhos brew his nectar countless times, and he’d heard him speak of it in those rare moments when the Tyrant Riot tended towards generosity. His insight was the next best thing to a recipe.

“Before the blackening, we must first rinse our cup.”

The Gadfly had first drawn a bronze jug from the pile of reagents on the cave’s floor. He’d dipped a white cloth into it that emerged silver-gray and wet, shimmering in the low fire light. Then he’d scrubbed the basin of the furnace until every portion was coated by the metallic substance.

“The kyrios’ thirst was an infamous thing - whether it was for gambling, games, or drink, there was little he wouldn’t do to have his cravings satiated. At the points where those individual desires converged, he became truly rabid. There was little he wouldn’t give to someone who could satisfy all of his desires at once, even if it was only for a moment.

“Each year when it came time to conduct the Raging Heaven’s rites, the kyrios would lay a wager at the feet of all his Elders. The terms were the same every time: A would-be initiate only had to venture a few steps alone into the storm crown to secure their admittance to the cult, that was the standard practice. However. If any of them could reach the peak of Kaukoso Mons, and if they could bring back proof that they’d done it, he would make a hero of them. He would reward both them and their faction’s Elder with a cup of purest nectar, to drink or give out as they wished.

“As long as I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish it. Each time when it became clear that their candidates had all failed yet again, the kyrios would offer his Elders the privilege of attempting the challenge for themselves. When they all refused, he’d venture up himself. Each time he’d drain his cup before vanishing into the storm.

“And each time he would return, his cup brimming to its edges with liquid lead.”

The first material needed to begin the synthesis -

“Prima materia.”

- was liquid lead.

The bronze jar of liquid metal had been a gift from the Gadfly, though he wouldn’t tell me what the gift had been given for nor when the kyrios had given it to him.

When the fire beneath the furnace had reached the lead, bubbling it and throwing off unpleasant vapors, the Gadfly had carefully poured a portion of the golden cup of wine into the stone basin. Then, before the lead and wine could fully mingle, he’d added a handful of coal black salt to the mixture.

“Now begins the first phase - the blackening.”

He’d pulled a lead spoon and a glossy black feather from his rags and used the spoon to stir the foul mixture while the feather balanced on the furnace rim. And then he’d settled in to wait.

And wait.

[Raven.]

“... You said the kyrios could compress this into a single pour.”

“I did.”

“How?”

“If I knew, I’d have done it that way already.”

Finally, after an untold number of hours and days watching the dark mixture simmer, adding more salt and wine as it reduced down, the Gadfly had declared the color close enough and moved on to the next phase of the process.

“Now the whitening.”

Milk came next, and a pure white feather that I had known at once we’d never get close to in color. The brew was a vile bubbling black. No amount of milk would lighten it to that extent. Yet even so, the Gadfly had poured into the basin milk from the cattle plains east of Olympia. Over time, he’d added honey from the coastal caves of Aornum. And intermixed with that, healing herbs and silver coins of every kind.

“We’re meant to drink this?”

“Mad, isn’t it? That was my thought the first time I saw it. The second and third times as well.”

[Swan.]

The mechanisms of the alchemical furnace were a mystery to me. There were no markings on it that I could see, no delicate moving parts that might hint at a more complex function than what we seemed to be using it as - a particularly hefty cooking pot. Yet somehow, over the course of hours and days, the bubbling black mixture had been turned bone-white by the addition of milk and honey.

Against all common sense, things were proceeding as the Gadfly had said they would. The only issue was how long each phase was taking.

Socrates didn’t trust me. He’d made that clear time and again since the day that I’d met him.

“The yellowing will take time. Watch this until I’m back. Stir the mixture with this spoon, and this spoon only. Don’t take your eyes off it, not even for an instant.”

Unfortunately for the master of my master’s master, I was not the full sum of his responsibilities. He’d had no other choice but to leave a portion of its care to me. The Gadfly had crushed a chunk of brittle yellow sulfur the size of my fist and sprinkled its fragments into the mix, placed a golden feather on the rim, and stalked out of the cave without another word.

When he’d returned in the predawn hours of the next morning with the faint scent of smoke lingering on his skin, I had offered him the lead spoon back without prompting. It was the first of several such exchanges.

I watched, and I trained my body while I waited for the brew to develop. When I slept, the Gadfly kept his vigil. When the Gadfly went out, I kept my own. Eventually, the mixture turned a deep and vibrant yellow.

[Eagle.]

Only one phase remained.

“The reddening.”

The overtures from the Raging Heaven’s Elders had grown more brazen by the day. The Games were close now, the city coming alive beneath us as spectators flooded in from all across the Free Mediterranean. In just a few short days, every Hero in contention for an Olympic crown would be inside the city’s walls. In a month, the kyrioi would join them.

The Elders were running out of time.

The last of the ingredients were cinnabar and a vibrant blue flower called the Water-Lily of the Nile. The Gadfly had mixed them in and then wrapped himself in his rags of anonymity, making for the cave’s exit as usual. There had been no feather placed along the rim this time. He’d assured me I wouldn’t need it to know.

So I’d settled in for another dull night, watching shadows dance along the cave walls while I stirred my listless spoon.

And then, faintly at first, I had heard it.

The strumming of a lyre.

[Phoe-]

[MY FELLOW SOLDIERS]

I staggered out of the cave and into the seething light of the Storm That Never Ceased and the looming dawn. I couldn’t hear the thunder over the ringing in my ears. I inhaled until it felt like my ribs would crack, filling every one of the channels burnt into me by starlight marrow, and I roared.

“SOCRATES!”

Back inside the cave, the furnace’s contents simmered blood red.

1.117 [The Young Miss-tocrat]

The Young Miss-tocrat

Time passed, but slower every day.

Niko had promised them, promised her, that he would find a way to get them a ship and their uncle’s permission to sail it east towards Olympia. He had promised to prepare them for the journey ahead, and in that regard he had tried. But the journey was what mattered most, and every day that passed it seemed just a bit further away.

Lydia knew she had to be patient. She knew that her chances of bringing Griffon home were far greater with Niko and his crew there to support her. More than that, she knew that if she wasn’t patient, if she let her frustration show through in just the slightest of degrees, it would push her youngest cousin over the edge. He was already so close as it was.

The last time she’d seen Myron had been the day he nearly killed their journey in the cradle before it could begin. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d most certainly known it when her siblings came pounding down her door later that night. Myron had told her siblings of their plan. He’d told Rena and Castor in the hopes that they would take his side, perhaps help him convince Niko to hurry things along. He had even told his brother, as if Heron could be trusted with such a secret in the first place.

He was just a boy, only ten years old. It was so easy to forget that when his cultivation was only a single step beneath hers. But he was still a boy, susceptible to impatience. He hadn’t found any other allies that day, but he also hadn’t sought her out since. She supposed locking himself in closed doors cultivation was better than the alternative. It kept him busy, at least.

Lydia had crept through her family's estate as if over eggshells the day after, just waiting for her father to come raging through her door. But somehow, miraculously, Heron did not immediately betray them to their parents. Perhaps he’d had a change of heart towards Griffon in his absence. Perhaps he’d simply been waiting for the right moment to sell them out.

If the latter was the case, he lost his chance soon after. The very next day, Uncle Damon had cracked open the heart of the eastern mountain range and ventured into its depths alongside the twin pillars of the Rosy Dawn, their wives, and Niko’s entire crew. They’d sealed the way shut behind them, locking themselves into their own closed doors cultivation. Even if Heron had wanted to give them up after that, there was no reaching them now.

It was undoubtedly a blessing. But every day that passed and her eldest cousin did not emerge from the mountain with their uncle’s blessing in hand, Lydia’s impression of it grew a bit more sour.

The longer this went on, the closer she was drawn to Myron’s state of mind. In those itchy, impatient moments, she turned to old habits and their familiar comforts. She honed her body. She honed her mind.

She forced herself to breathe.

Though recently, even that was not quite so tranquil as it used to be.

TYM

“I can’t do it,” the slave despaired. Again.

“You can,” Lydia told her without opening her eyes. She inhaled smoothly, and exhaled with equal ease. Her pneuma spun throughout her body in a perfect spiral. Ebbing and flowing predictably, ever in her control.

Athis tried again, drawing in a deep breath and attempting to guide it through her body. Lydia felt the girl's untrained pneuma rise around her, an immediate sign that she was off the mark, and a second later Athis’ breath hitched and she devolved into a coughing fit. Her pneuma scattered in the wind, dissipating without any greater purpose to guide it.

“I can’t!” Athis insisted. If nothing else, the bleak defeatism that had colored their early interactions was now giving way to a pure, burning frustration. A step in the right direction.

“You can,” Lydia repeated.

Athis made a helpless, infuriated sound that she smothered in the back of her throat before it could reach the open air. She shifted in place, skin scraping the stone of the hidden alcove, and stood.

“Even if I could, what would it matter? T-this won’t - it won’t make me stronger! It’s a waste of time!”

Lydia opened her eyes, pleasantly surprised. This was new.

“Your pneuma is your vital essence, the source of all your greater works,” she said simply. “The way you breathe, the focus behind it - that’s the foundation for everything else that I could teach you. Controlled breathing comes first.”

“At least…” The mousy girl's fists clenched as she fought her instinctive urge to shrink away from Lydia’s focus. “At least teach me how to use a spear. Teach me how to move like you do. Please. I can learn both at the same time, can’t I?”

“No.”

“Why not!?” It seemed the slave had reached the limits of her patience.

Lydia didn’t hold it against her. She knew the feeling.

“Strength does not spring forth from a void,” she informed the slave, and rose abruptly to her feet. Athis stepped back and promptly slipped. Her eyes flew open wide and her breath rushed out of her in a horrified gasp. The slave fell back, over the edge of the cliffside alcove overlooking the Scarlet City.

Lydia caught her by the plain white dress she’d gifted her and hauled the girl back inside.

“You were clumsy your entire life before you stepped into the Civic Realm, and you’re still clumsy now,” Lydia said, letting go and watching her sink down to her knees. “Cultivation is a process. It is refinement of your body and soul, and you’ve only just begun.

“When I first awoke and became aware of my own pneuma, I did not immediately take to the spear. You have to walk before you start running.”

“It looks so simple when you do it,” Athis whispered. “In the yards, with the other women of the cult. It looks so simple. Powerful, but effortlessly so.”

“It is,” Lydia confirmed. “But in the same way that walking is effortless - none of us were born on our feet. We were all clumsy children once, struggling to carry our own weight and stand without the help of others. Understand that you are still that child.”

The slave’s head dipped, her momentary ire giving way to morose acceptance.

“I thought…” Athis bunched up the fabric of her dress, gripping it like a lifeline. “I thought it would change me. I thought being a cultivator would make things simple.”

“Cultivation doesn’t raise the ground beneath your feet,” Lydia explained, not unkindly. “It only clears the skies above your head.”

It was a lesson she’d learned herself the hard way, as every cultivator did. Refinement was an endless grueling journey. Cultivation did not remove the competitor’s need to train; it only removed the upper limits on what they could achieve. A crude soul had limits. A cultivator could refine themselves endlessly, so long as they did what it took to grow beyond themselves.

For some, that knowledge was the only encouragement they’d ever need. Athis was not one of those people.

Lydia sighed and made a decision.

“Come with me. We’re going to the city.”

“Wha-? Why?”

Lydia turned and left the cave. Athis scrambled out after her.

“I don’t know how to teach you in a way you’ll understand, and we’ll be leaving this place soon.” Soon, Myron’s voice echoed disdainfully in her mind. Lydia grimaced. No, Athis wasn’t the only one tired of sitting around and waiting. “Fortunately for you, I know someone who does.”

“Who?” Athis asked, hopeful and apprehensive in equal measure. It was no secret that the men of the cult terrified her.

Lydia gave the slave an arch look over her shoulder.

“Rejoice, slave. This Young Miss is offering you an opportunity that her fellow mystikos would leap into an open flame for. The chance to learn from my master - the Sand Reckoner himself.”

And if she happened to bring a request of her own before the wise man? If that request just happened to be nautical in its nature? Well, what was the harm? She would be patient. Niko would come through for them soon, she knew that.

Soon.

TYM

“Tread lightly,” she advised the slave when they reached their destination. It was an unassuming home built in the city’s outer limits, nearly brushing up against the eastern mountain range. The building itself was rundown, just short of dilapidated, and the door was unbarred when she pressed on it.

Athis hesitated, glancing warily around. They were far from the city center, but that didn’t mean there was no one on the streets. She didn’t want to go in, but she didn’t want to be left out alone either.

“Is he… cruel?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have brought you here if he was.”

“Then, why-?”

“I was speaking literally,” she said, stepping through the open door. “Tread lightly.”

Her mentor’s workshop was exactly as she remembered it.

An utter mess.

Everywhere Lydia looked, she saw disaster. The chaos was familiar, but the details of it had changed in the months since she’d last paid her mentor a visit. This place had once been a home, long before she was born, but her mentor had gutted it of its creature comforts soon after his arrival. Furniture was wasted space, so far as he was concerned.

What furniture did remain, tables of varying styles and materials that she knew had been chosen for their varying heights rather than aesthetic belonging, were covered corner-to-corner by the tools of her mentor’s trade and notes scrawled in his spidery handwriting. His reference shapes abounded - cylinders, spheres, and other geometric shapes all carved from wood or chiseled out of marble, piling up on the floor or weighing down sheets of papyrus so they wouldn’t fly away when the winds came in.

Lydia stepped carefully through the chaos, making sure not to disturb a single bauble or tool, no matter how frivolously it seemed they’d been cast about the workshop. Controlled chaos, her mentor called it, and heaven help anyone that threatened his control over it.

“Oh,” Athis breathed, standing in the open doorway behind her and looking in on the madness. “Now I see.”

“It gets worse,” Lydia assured her, creeping through a small maze of copper mirrors on adjustable iron stands. “Close the door behind you and watch every step you take. He’s usually in the courtyard, but he could also be under one of these piles.”

“He could be what?”

“Close the door,” Lydia said sharply. Athis pulled it shut and pressed her back against it.

“Shouldn’t we wait for him to invite us in?” the slave asked helplessly. Her pneuma rose and fell around her, flickering fitfully. “You can call out to him, surely-”

“He wouldn’t answer if I did.” Lydia shook her head. She’d learned that lesson long ago. “We have to go to him. We’ll check the courtyard first, and if he’s not there-”

Athis gasped, and a loud thump sounded from behind Lydia as the slave girl slipped and tried to catch herself on a nearby table for balance. She closed her eyes at the cascade of noise that followed as the girl brought down the table and all its contents with her to the floor.

She supposed it was her fault for trying.

“Who dares!?”

He’d been in the courtyard after all.

Athis scrambled to her feet like a wild hare, the white of her eyes showing as she turned back and lunged for the door. She rebounded off it with an ugly sound, and no matter how many times she beat herself against it, despite the fact that it had been open for anyone to trespass just moments before, it would not budge.

Lydia mouthed a silent prayer for patience, and then cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted back in the direction of the courtyard.

“Your student, Lydia Aetos! I’ve come to seek your wisdom!”

“Impossible!”

Lydia’s brow furrowed. “And why is that?”

“My student may be worthless in most ways that matter, but she knows better than to disrupt her master’s work!”

“Haa?” Lydia scowled and lifted her leg to place the heel of her foot against the side of another table. The sand reckoner howled in frustration as another small avalanche of his work went tumbling to the floor.

“You’re making a mess!”

“This mess predates me!” She shouted back, wading through the remaining clutter out into the courtyard.

Hunched over a dioptra he used to watch the stars at night and measure angles by day, Archimedes looked up from his work only just long enough to glare at her as she appeared in his line of sight.

The old philosopher was exactly as she remembered him, ragged and unkempt. He wore the same washed-out reds he always had, silks that had once been as fine a scarlet as her own Rosy Dawn attire. His hair was long and wild, as was his beard, and the bone-white color of both gave away his ancient nature as surely as the lines around his squinting eyes. Not laugh lines, of course. Her mentor had never been one for comedy.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” Archimedes demanded crossly, his hands continuing to work blindly with an iron drawing compass and a stick of charcoal even as he glared at her.

“You’re always busy.”

“Exactly right. Exactly right. And yet my peace is ever disturbed by yapping children.”

“The price of wisdom,” Lydia said blithely, stepping out into the courtyard. It was no less a mess, but there was at least a path through the chaos out here - a spiral path of stepping stones that funneled from the furthest edges of the courtyard into the central point where the philosopher did his stargazing and deepest thinking. “This one has a favor to ask of you.”

There came another crash from back inside the workshop. “Two favors,” she amended.

“No.”

“I beg the master-”

“Beg the ocean waves for all that I care! I am busy.”

Patience. Patience. Lydia counted to ten. “I see that-”

“You see nothing.” The old bastard waved her off with his stick of charcoal, turning back to the masterfully crafted dioptra he was currently using as a work bench. “Would that you had eyes to see - you might actually learn something of what I do here.”

“You’re drawing circles!” Lydia snapped, unable to take it any longer. She reached up to one of the courtyard’s olive trees and pulled off a sheet of papyrus that Archimedes had skewered on the branch for safekeeping. “Here’s one!” She grabbed a second, then a third, plucking them like leaves. “Another circle, more circles - oh! My, a cylinder, how exciting. And yet again more circles!”

“Idiot!” he roared. “I am mapping out the future! I am unraveling the scarlet threads of Fate, doing what the Oracles only wish that they could do!”

“You are drawing circles!”

“Excuse me-!”

“WHAT!?” Mentor and student shouted at once, and shy Athis cowered in the space between the courtyard’s pillars.

“Never mind,” the slave whispered.

Archimedes snorted and returned to his work.

“What do you want?” he asked Lydia impatiently. “Make it quick.”

Lydia held a hand out towards the slave. “This girl’s name is Athis. She’s just awoken to her place in this world, and I’ve been trying to teach her your breathing technique-” Before she could say another word, the sand reckoner drew a scroll of papyrus from a fold in his faded red rags and threw it at the slave’s head. Athis flinched away, banged her head against one of the courtyard pillars, and somehow got hit by the scroll anyway.

“There. Go.”

“I thought a more direct lesson might-”

“No. I have more than enough students already. Go.”

It had been too long since she’d been here. She’d forgotten how the man was when he was truly absorbed in his work - which was almost always.

“Just one more thing,” she said. The old philosopher grunted. “I’ve had a powerful urge to sail as of late, but I lack a ship and the Rosy Dawn has none to spare. Do you have any…?”

“Ships?” Archimedes said flatly. “Do I have any ships lying around my workshop? Perhaps tucked away in my-”

“Schematics!” she said quickly. “Do you have any schematics for a ship? Something an amateur could build, perhaps?”

The design and manufacturing of ships was only one of her mentor’s many accolades, and one of the trades he spent the least of his time honing, but that made him no less a master of the craft. It was perhaps a touch presumptuous of her to start this process on her own, but surely Niko would understand. He might even appreciate her initiative-

“Ask the boy.”

Lydia blinked. “What?”

“The boy.” He waved his charcoal stick in a circular motion, as if to conjure up the memory of him. He gave it up a moment later. “He came in a few… hours? Days? However long ago it was. He came in and nagged me endlessly for measurements on a sailing skiff. Go ask him for a turn - I won’t waste time drawing another set.”

“What boy?” Lydia stepped towards the center of the spiral, feeling a cold dread sink its talons in her spine. “Master, what was his name?”

Archimedes scoffed. “As if I asked.”

“What did he look like?”

“What does every boy look like?”

“This tall- look!” Lydia hissed, and he grudgingly looked up from his work. She held her hand above the ground, at roughly her stomach’s height. “This tall?”

“Near enough.”

Her heart was hammering, she realized.

“Blond hair that curls around his ears? Rosy dawn attire, and a belt with two daggers?” Lydia pressed him, her panic rising every time he nodded. “Where did he stand? Where did he stand!?”

“Ninth rank.”

Lydia sagged against the olive tree beside her in relief. Her youngest cousin was only in the eighth rank of the Civic Realm, and he was new to it at that. For a moment, she’d thought… no, he was only ten years old, but he wasn’t a fool. He’d have told her.

Archimedes, for his part, was tapping the points of his drawing compass to his forehead as he dug through his scattered memories.

“Little wretch never told me his name. Spent half his time posturing and the other half trying to pluck at my heartstrings. My cousin needs my help, but I can’t get there without a ship! As if he didn’t plan on using it to fish-”

The old philosopher went on grumbling, but Lydia didn’t hear another word of it. She’d already bounded back into the courtyard and burst through the front door’s locks, sprinting back towards the eastern mountain range while Athis cried out and begged for her to slow down.

He came in a few… Hours? Days? However long ago it was.

She hadn’t seen Myron since the day he’d nearly given them away in his frustration. It had been weeks since then.

“No, no, no,” she whispered in between spiraling breaths, surging up the mountainside in great bounding leaps. Cresting the mountain, she promptly slammed through a pair of young mystikos jogging along the mountain trail and sent them both tumbling. She kept running, rushing through the Rosy Dawn estates and down the other side of the eastern mountain range.

“You only had to wait!”

In the distance, past the wheat fields and rocky beaches, the Ionian shimmered clear blue in the sun’s light.

Lydia fell from the mountain as much as she descended it, leaping off entirely as soon as she was close enough to make the jump without breaking a limb, and rolled through the impact into a dead sprint towards the beach. Birds and slaves alike were scattered from the fields as she shot past. Behind her, so distant she could hardly hear it over the pounding of her heart, her fellow mystikos were following her in alarmed pursuit.

When she finally planted her feet and halted her momentum in an explosion of flying sand, she was at the foot of the Scarlet City’s eastern docks. The same docks where she’d stood less than a year ago awaiting her oldest cousin’s arrival, arm-in-arm with her fiance. She’d come here first, fully expecting she’d have to comb through every stade of these beaches in search of a sign.

And she saw that there was no need. The sign was right there in the center of the docks, buried in the planks. Plain as day, just waiting to be found.

A jagged strip of sloppily-carved hardwood. An amateur’s first attempt at a deck plank, worthless for a ship. But it served just fine as a message post. The message was short, carved into the post by a child’s careful hand.

I’ll do it myself.

“Senior sister!” someone shouted. Several people, actually.

She could see it.

“Young Miss!”

There, nearly over the line of the horizon. That distant bobbing speck.

“Lydia-!”

Lydia took two bounding steps across the deck and dove into the sea.

1.116

The Young Griffon

Three Heroes came to me in the aftermath of Alazon’s shameful defeat, and all three produced a letter written by a Roman’s heavy hand.

Sol had given each of them a destination to search when he first reached out to them through Sorea. All three of them had rejected our grand mission in the aftermath of Chilon’s story, but Sol had given them the information anyway. He’d given them the option, as well as time to consider it. As it turned out, that had been enough for Alyssa and Kyno to change their minds.

It didn’t amount to much. The Sword Song and the Heroic Huntsman came back as empty-handed as the Gold-String Guardian, who had never left Olympia in the first place.

Kyno brandished the carefully folded slip of papyrus Sol had sent him. To his right, Elissa’s eyes slid away from me to watch two of Alazon’s fellow competitors drag him cursing and struggling out of the Olympic Stadium. On the other side of the Huntsman, Lefteris stared hard at me. His own papyrus message was a cracked and crumpled mess, held in a white-knuckled fist.

“Is this the truth?” Kyno asked me.

Not too long ago, I would have deflected that question without hesitation. Now, I lowered myself to the pit sand and motioned for them to join me.

Kino knelt obligingly, though even then he was taller than most mortal men. Alyssa tore her attention from Alazon’s retreating figure with the ghost of a smirk on her lips and sat cross-legged beside Kyno. I waited a moment for Lefteris to join us in the sand. He stood stone still, glowering down at me.

I hummed, considering them each in turn. The Sword Song, the Heroic Huntsman, and the Gold-String Guardian. Three Heroes that I had claimed as my own, the same way that Sol had claimed Scythas, Jason, and Anastasia as his. Three Heroes that regarded me now as a dangerous unknown. Had I not been every bit as truthful to them as Sol had been to his Heroes? Had I ever once told them a lie?

My heart flickered in my chest. An answer, maybe. I ignored it.

“Show me and I’ll tell you,” I told them.

Kyno placed his letter on the sand in front of me. Elissa followed his example, flicking her own missive across the space between us. Lefteris clicked his tongue and threw his crumpled ball down last.

“Elissa and I have spent weeks abroad, searching for mythical ingredients without any clue as to what those ingredients actually were,” Kyno informed me quietly, dark eyebrows furrowing as he regarded me. He wasn’t quite angry. More discontented. The skinned crocodile he wore like a cloak looked furious enough for the two of them. “We could have spent that time preparing for the Games. Instead, we spent it helping you.”

“Helping us?”

A muscle in my neck twinged when I tilted my head. I had shown Alazon the difference between us, but I hadn’t come away from it unscathed. Even the small movements were painful, more so as the moments passed and the numbing thrill of our fight seeped out of my body.

“You help yourselves,” I corrected him. “You have something you want, and you’re no longer certain the games are the clearest path to achieving it. You don’t believe you can win, not really. You don’t know that it would matter if you did. After all, what’s a laurel crown worth beyond the warmth you’d glean from burning it?”

I leaned forward, an elbow propped on my knee. “A cup of nectar, though? Even if it’s less than a cup - even if it’s only a sip, its value is undeniable. Worth more than any crown.”

None of them denied it. I turned and spat blood onto the sand.

“If it’s a lie, then he lied to me too.” I held up my own message from Sorea, and though the exact details of it were different, the thrust of the message was the same. The Gadfly, Socrates, had deceived us. The ingredients needed to synthesize nectar had been known to him from the start - more than that, they’d been in the old wretch’s possession this whole time. The only portion that he’d been missing was the cup of mad wine that we’d retrieved from Thracia.

Now that we knew, we could search with clear intent. We could scour the nearest marks on the map with purpose, and we could comb through the wares of merchants traveling from the more distant destinations. And if all went well, if there was wine remaining after the first batch was brewed, we could take the Gadfly’s knowledge and make a second for ourselves.

The benefits of nectar were the subject of myth and legend. Immortality, divine constitution, advancement through entire mortal realms, and on and on it went. Even if only a few of them were true, even if only one of them was reality, a cup would be a treasure worth any Tyrant’s favor. A paltry sip would be more than equal to a lifetime of closed doors cultivation.

The possibilities were endlessly enticing. It was enough to draw even Lefteris here, in spite of his misgivings. It was enough to draw any sane man away from this stadium in its pursuit.

“Then you’d be coming with us?” Elissa asked me.

“No.”

Lefteris’ pneuma shifted dangerously. In my mind’s eye, I pictured it pulling taut like the string of a bow. Ready to loose at the subject of his ire. Me, naturally.

“If this was real, you’d happily abandon your time in the pit for it. Not ask us to do it in your stead,” he said tightly. The flames behind his eyes brightened. “You have as much to gain from this as we do.”

I considered that.

“Do I?”

They didn’t know me. Not well enough to say one way or another.

In the end, they didn’t care enough to ask.

Kyno, Elissa, and Lefteris took back their marching orders and left me in the pit. Off to do the raven’s work, regardless of how much it chafed them to waste time running errands with the Games on the horizon. I hadn’t lied in my goading. They valued the nectar more than they valued their slim chances at an Olympic crown.

As for why that was the case? Of course, I couldn’t know. None of them would tell me.

“Griffon…” Chilon laid a careful hand on my shoulder. “Breathe.”

I obliged him.

The irritation remained.

VS

I became something of a novelty to the Heroes in the pit after my scrap with Alazon. I supposed that in their eyes, that had been my crucible overcome - it was a grand triumph for a lowly second rank sophist to overcome a Hero in even the most controlled environment. As far as they were concerned, I’d earned myself his place in the pit.

That didn’t make me a competitor, of course. But I was interesting enough to have around until the true games began.

I broke bread and exchanged words with more Heroic cultivators in the days that followed than most people would ever see in their entire lives. Some of them wore the colorful silks that marked their mystery faith allegiance, but most didn’t bother. Some of them were kind, offering kernels of their expertise to the young upstart. Some were flippant, calling me over to parade around their peers and daring me to try on them what I had done to Alazon.

It was behavior I’d seen before, in the mountain trails and sparring halls of the Rosy Dawn Cult. They were senior to me, and so my actions didn’t truly matter to them.

I amused them. Nothing more and nothing less.

VS

Elissa was the first to return with ingredients in hand.

Of the three Heroes I’d claimed, I had met Elissa first. Sol’s wandering eye had called them all to us through the funeral crowds, but it had been my hand that slapped the Sword Song’s face. By my notice alone had she been condemned.

She was known as the Sword Song because her master had been the finest blade to grace Olympia in generations, and under his guidance she made every blade she touched dance. The sword she carried with her was pure and undecorated bronze. She was less brazen with its use than our first meeting had led me to believe.

Elissa was kind to her juniors in action if not word. She was quick to anger, and biting in her rage. Her master was gone in search of something she wouldn’t speak to, and he hadn’t taken her with him.

Her eyes were the color of desert heat. Her marble-pale skin was marred by ugly scars uncommon for someone of her standing. She wore the fuchsia silks of the Scattered Foam Cult in Egypt.

It was information I could have gathered from any number of loose-lipped sophists on Kaukoso Mons. It was all I knew.

Elissa brought me milk in an ornate jug carved from white-gold electrum and sealed by a lid of the same material that interlocked with its container when twisted. The milk was from the cattle plains beyond the mountains Boeon, just east of Olympia. It was thick and rich, coating my tongue like sweet cream when I dabbed a drop of it on my tongue.

While I admired the taste of it, she dropped a chunk of brick-red cinnabar the size of my clenched fist in the sand.

“Cream from Levanta’s sacred cattle, and quicksilver mined from Giza,” the Sword Song declared.

“Egypt and back in three days?” I asked, impressed.

She snorted. “To the agora and back in three hours. The cream was the more difficult prospect of the two - I had to milk the damned cow myself.” Her eyes swept over me, and her nose wrinkled. “You look vile.”

I ran a hand through the golden snarls in my hair. It had grown longer and wilder in the months since I’d left the Scarlet City, and I’d neglected its care recently. Though I could burn away the sand and sweat that clung to me here in the pit, I couldn’t do much for my tangled hair and tattered silks.

“I suppose I could use a bath,” I mused. I raised an eyebrow up at the Heroine. “Care to join me?”

Elissa’s eyes rolled. “I’ve wasted enough time as it is.” Her delivery done, she promptly toed a circle in the sand and claimed a portion of my space for herself. She drew her bronze blade and began smoothly working it through the air, limbering up her body slice by slice.

“Time spent in good company is never truly wasted,” I reasoned.

“True enough.” She continued through her sword motions.

I tucked the electrum jar of sacred cream and the chunk of cinnabar both into my shadow and stood, pulling from the raven’s talons in turn one of the blades I’d stolen from the storm crown.

“Teach me,” I demanded, and only then did the Sword Song grace me with her full focus. I stepped over the line she’d drawn in the sand and joined her in her dance.

VS

The sun rose and fell, and rose again. The final day before the mandatory month of training loomed large on the horizon. Soon, the greatest of the competitors would arrive. Soon, even the Heroes that refused to tolerate a Tyrant’s yoke would have to make themselves known or else forfeit their chance at the Olympic flame.

Soon, the real Heroes would come.

VS

Lefteris returned second.

The Gold-String Guardian had been the last to directly answer Sol’s call at Bakkhos’ funeral rites, though he’d broken off from the trail of the Roman’s influence when he spotted three of his peers gathered in apparent confrontation around a single first-rank sophist. His eyes had landed first on Scythas, and in the same moment dismissed him with contempt. They’d settled on Kyno and Elissa, wary and questioning.

There was history between them, camaraderie that ran deeper than the fragile understanding between Sol’s companions. Lefteris was a known quantity to Elissa and Kyno, just as they were to him.

Alone, he may as well have not existed in the Raging Heaven Cult. It was a Hero’s nature to stand out in every crowd, but Lefteris did everything he could to avoid the questing eyes of the masses - besides, of course, not being a member of the most renowned cult in the free mediterranean.

He was protective of his secrets and prone to paranoia. Not that he was wrong.

The Gold-String Guardian was tall, lean, and tanned a deep bronze by the desert weather of his mystery faith. He wore the same fuschia silks that Elissa did, belted negligently around his waist so that they hung loosely from his shoulders and revealed the bronze breastplate he wore at all times. He carried a greatbow with him everywhere he went, and its string was shining gold.

I’d learned more about Lefteris from the two boys he watched over than I had from the man himself. A pair of young civic brothers with mismatched eyes and spirits that matched their fiery hair, Lefteris acted as a secret guardian to both Leo and Pyr. Whatever else could be said about the Gold-String Guardian, he took that role seriously. The one and only time he’d struck out at me had been the moment I had reached for his boys in Elissa’s home with apparent malintent.

How they’d come to be in his care, and why he’d chosen to hide them in the Raging Heaven Cult of all places, I could only guess. The boys didn’t know everything about their guardian, unfortunately. And of course, he’d never tell me himself.

Lefteris tossed a hemp sack and a chunk of yellow ore at my feet while I traded choreographed blows with Elissa. I scooped each up in hand of pankration intent and brought them into my line of sight while I continued moving through our dance.

Inside the hemp sack was what looked like shimmering black sand. When a pankration hand carefully dabbed a crystal to my tongue, it tasted like a rotten egg. The pale yellow mineral chunk was about as large as the cinnabar that Elissa had brought back, though this one was brittle in comparison.

“Black lava salt from the Himalayas and sulfur from Libya’s fire mountains,” Lefteris reported. He didn’t wait for me to confirm before adding on, “I want two portions of the brew.”

“Ho?” I raised an eyebrow at him, tilting my head bemusedly and avoiding Elissa’s telegraphed stab in the process. “How greedy.”

“If he gets two, then I want three,” Elissa chimed in. Lefteris shot her an ugly look, and she smirked. “Only fair, Left. You spent all your time in the market - I had to milk a sacred cow.”

“You are a sacred cow,” Lefteris snapped, and she laughed.

“If we’re measuring by that metric, the two of you will be lucky to receive a drop,” I said lightly. Lefteris’ ire swiveled back to me, while Elissa heaved a sigh.

“This story again,” the Sword Song lamented.

“A mad dash through the underworld for the perfect cup of wine, and a meeting with a faceless wonder to crown the journey,” Lefteris summarized the story as Elissa had told it to him and Kyno, derision behind every word. “Truly, I’m surprised the two of you didn’t ascend on the spot.”

I brushed aside Elissa’s bronze blade with my own tribulation iron and stepped back, ending the dance. My eyes narrowed.

“I showed you the proof.” I held up the totenpass from Philadelphus so both of them could see it. When I’d first shown it to her, there had been a moment where I’d seen her waver on the edge of believing me. There had been an opportunity there, I knew. But it had passed before I could grasp it in my hands.

Now, Elissa only shrugged. “It’s a pretty necklace. Goes well with your ruby.”

“I can show you,” I offered, ignoring the dull roar of blood in my ears and gathering my pneuma around the memory of that mad journey. My eyes flitted from Elissa to Lefteris. “In fact, why don’t we trade? Truth for truth, lived experience for lived experience.”

“Two portions,” Lefteris said simply, ignoring the offer entirely and shrugging off his black and fuschia silks so they hung around his waist like mine. He pulled his bow up over his shoulder and nocked an arrow to it. “Elissa, get moving. You’re my target.”

“According to who?” she challenged him. Lefteris hummed, drawing back his golden string. The fires behind his eyes burned brightly.

“According to this arrow, I’d say.”

Elissa cursed and lunged sideways as he loosed, but she was too close and he’d predicted her. The arrow whistled across the distance in the blink of an eye-

And froze as a bright rosy hand caught its shaft out of the air.

I gave the Gold-String Guardian his arrow back, dropping my tribulation blade back into my shadow as I did.

“I’ll be your target,” I offered him. Lefteris eyed me for a long moment.

Then he nodded, and drew his string again.

VS

Every heroic soul was a uniquely excellent existence. Every Hero was a man worth telling stories of, and every Heroine was a woman worth knowing.

So why was it the more of them I met, the less I cared to ask their names?

VS

Kyno’s journey took him furthest by far, and so he was the last of the three to return.

The Heroic Huntsman, son of Broken Tides and largest of us all. I’d noticed him long before he’d reached us through the funeral crowds, towering as he did over everyone else in attendance. He’d held Elissa back from seeking a second round with me while Sol was busy elsewhere, and the longer I knew him the more it became clear that that was a familiar role for him.

In spite of his dark eyes and the cruel power in his hulking frame, Kyno was slowest to anger of the three and moved always with a hunter’s careful purpose. He acted as a balancing force between Elissa and Lefteris, anchoring them when their tempers ran away from them. He was observant, and thoughtful in his way.

He wore a virtuous beast like a cloak over his Broken Tide blues, a skinned crocodile that could act on its own volition at any time. He was broad, tanned, dark of hair, and perpetually scowling - though he rarely meant anything by it.

The one and only time I’d seen him truly shaken had been in the hallowed temple of the Broken Tide’s Oracle. Slowest to anger and last to speak his mind in rage, I knew him least of all.

The Heroic Huntsman sat beside me in the shaded sand while Elissa and Lefteris dueled with knives out in the sun, each of them dripping sweat and intensely focused. Kyno held his spoils out to me and waited patiently until I took them.

“A fine bouquet.” I accepted the bundle of flowers and herbs and raised them to my nose. The smell of them was pleasantly refreshing, and one scent in particular stood out sweetly among the rest. It was the centerpiece of the bouquet, a vibrant blue lily with a golden bud in its center. There was only one in the entire bundle.

“Blue Lily of the Nile,” Kyno said, nodding to the centerpiece. “And medicinal herbs from Paleta’s healing hills.”

“Purchased from the agora, I suppose?” I murmured, plucking the blue lily from the bundle and twirling its stem between my fingers.

Kyno shook his head. “I’m not that fortunate. No, I swam for this one.”

I blinked. “You swam? From Pelloponesia to Egypt?”

“I had help.” He patted the tail of his crocodile skin, and the creature’s reptilian eyes glinted. I might have mistaken it as a sunlight reflection if not for the fact that we were both sitting in the shade.

“Does it have a name?” I asked. For some reason, Kyno seemed surprised.

“Sah-bakari.” An Egyptian name.

“You met in Egypt,” I said, the pieces coming together in my mind.

“I met the crocodile in Egypt, yes,” Kyno said, smiling faintly. I waved a hand.

“No, not the beast. You met them in Egypt,” I said, pointing to Elissa and Lefteris as they dueled. Kyno winced and said nothing.

I frowned, considering his silence. Perhaps they’d only bonded over it. How long had it taken them to form their current camaraderie? How much of it had been forged beneath the storm crown in Olympia, and how much of it had developed in the south? Had they been in Egypt recently?

Had any of them been there to see Sol mount a Roman flag atop the Conqueror’s lighthouse?

“Kyno-”

“Another time. It’s not my story to tell.”

The burning hands of my intent dug furrows in the sand around us, forming a molten octagon. I stood and offered the larger cultivator a hand up.

“Pankration,” was all I said. Kyno nodded and took my hand. I heaved him to his feet.

Then I hooked my heel around his and dropped him straight back down to the sand.

VS

Three days before the gates were to be shut for the final month of training, Chilon offered me a furtive gift while Kyno, Elissa, and Lefteris were occupied.

Three papyrus scrolls, each of them with a different image painted on their outer surface. One of them was a bow with a golden string. Another was a bronze blade clashing against a flute. And the last of them a crocodile with its maw opened wide.

For a moment, I could do nothing but stare down at the recorded tales of the Gold-String Guardian, the Sword Song, and the Heroic Huntsman in utter disbelief.

“You’ve been spending so much time with them,” the senior Philosopher said quietly, tying shut his fishing net of myths and legends, “I thought you might like to know their stories.”

“What makes you think I don’t already?” I found the words to ask. Chilon only clapped a hand to my shoulder and rose.

“Don’t take it so personally, junior. They live in a different world than we do. Be thankful they’ve taken the time to train you. It’s more than most sophists will ever get from a hero.”

With that he took his leave from the pit for the night, leaving me with that foul sentiment ringing in my ears and a bundle of priceless papyrus cradled in my hands. Each of them was a story I’d been trying to draw out of my companions directly for weeks, months. Each of them was a Hero’s labor put to paper. And, if I was fortunate, each of them would be an answer to the question I’d been asking them from the very beginning.

What are you afraid of?

These were the answers I’d wanted all along. These were the stories Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris refused to tell me, no matter how many times I prodded them or what I offered in exchange. Chilon had given me the gift of their origins.

Rosy burning light bloomed in my cupped palms. The edges of the papyrus blackened and curled.

VS

Two days before the deadline, Scythas came to me with his and Jason’s share of the reagents cradled in a jar in his arms. He upended it, and a cascade of lead and silver coins poured out onto the sands.

I ignored the coins. When he went to announce them, I cut the Hero off with a question.

“Would you have told me your story if Sol wasn’t there with us?”

“What?” Scythas’ brow furrowed. His heart flickered in my perceptions. “You mean-?”

“On the Eos,” I clarified. I’d separated myself from Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris, but a few curious eyes turned our way as I pressed him. “If Sol wasn’t there. If it was me, and me alone. Would you have told the same story?”

Our time in Thracia had brought many things to light. It had given us common ground.

Scythas sighed.

“You already know the answer to that question, Griffon.”

I did.

VS

The final day before the deadline, I shattered Chilon’s ribs. It only took a moment of distraction for a fight to turn sour, and my mind had been elsewhere for days. It was an unforgivable lapse in concentration.

While I was fighting his body’s natural inclination to let him die, Anastasia came to me with a jar of honey and her own healing hands.

“Who are you, really?”

As if the answer mattered.

VS

“Not everyone is made of iron. For some, the fire only burns.”

I’d known it since the day I ventured through the storm crown. From the moment that I tore down that door and stalked into Elissa’s home in blood and wrath and named them all cowards for backing down from the Gadfly, I’d seen it in their eyes. Whether or not they believed that my standing was as it appeared, that made no difference.

From that day on I was an enemy to them. An enemy they could work with, perhaps. An enemy they could trust, in some sense. But never a friend. Never what Sol was to his trio.

I’d thought that bond was made of iron. But in the end, I’d only burnt it to ashes and scattered them to the wind. I’d left nothing left to mend.

VS

“If we can kill what can not die, what's to say we can't also mend what can not be mended?”

VS

The dawn broke over the back of a dead moon night. At the end of this day, any would-be champion outside the city of Olympia would be barred from participation.

As the first rosy fingers of morning light reached out past the writhing pillar of the storm crown, Sorea came hurtling out of the sky and struck the sand like a javelin. The eagle shrieked, beating its wings and flinging sand around it in a cloud. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by Heroic cultivators, all crowding around the bird.

“Sorea?” Anastasia reached out, concerned, but the bird only snapped at her fingers.

“What is it!?” Scythas asked the bird urgently.

“Take the message!” Elissa hissed.

The virtuous beast kept on shrieking, making no move to vomit up a scroll. The only thing of note it was carrying was a scrap of torn white cloth in its talons. It took me a dozen pankration hands and several filthy curses to pry it from the bird’s grip. As soon as I had the cloth in my hands, the eagle beat its wings and shot back up into the sky. Off towards the storm crown.

“What does it say?” Jason demanded. Behind him, silent but intent, Kyno and Lefteris leaned in for a closer look.

The message was a single word scrawled hastily on the cloth.

COME

We ran like we had lightning in our heels.

1.115 [Caesar's Edict]

“A young maiden is foraging in the woods one blind night. She’s about your age, and, oh, about your size. With eyes and mind as pure as moonlight. She is too kind to hunt, you see, but her hunger won’t be sated by kindness. While she scraps and scuffles for whatever fruits the earth has left behind for her, she finds herself a wolf.

“Or, perhaps more likely, the wolf finds itself a maiden.

“It is a massive beast with cruel fangs and claws the length of knives. But those fangs are stained by wolf blood, and those claws are chipped and broken. There are arrows in its back. Though it has found itself a likely meal, it lacks the strength to secure it.

“The wolf is starving.”

VS

The unwed, man-eating Amazons.

The title was an unkind one, and not at all uncommon in its sentiment. The warrior women of the Aegean’s eastern shores were an uncomfortable constant in the histories of the Free Mediterranean, dubbed horse-lovers and war-makers and king-slayers. Their vicious Queens and roving bands of war sisters were a recurring presence in the grand cycle of epics, a constant threat to the enlightened civilizations across the Aegean Sea.

Before the Conqueror discovered the greater mystery of the Scattered Foam Cult and forced his Pearl City upon the Free Mediterranean, the Amazon city of Nkri was considered the most foreign of the free polis by far. The Amazon city was reviled by its peers for much the same reason the Conqueror’s Alexandria was - the Amazons had discovered a greater mystery that was undeniable in its origins, and had entrenched themselves so deeply in the lands surrounding it that the effort needed to dislodge them would have ruined any one of their rivals. They refused to conform and made themselves impossible to deny, and they were hated for it.

The Blind Maiden Cult was named for reasons few men would ever find out, but it was an appropriate name regardless of the deeper mystery behind it. Whether or not the infamous hatred of men so often attributed to the Amazons was true or not, what could be proven was that they took no husbands and refused to suffer a king. They were a matriarchy in its purest sense.

Equal to any man in agility, strength, and stature even before the question of refinement was put forward, the Amazon was a looming presence on the eastern frontier of enlightened civilization. From the grasslands of Scythia to the sand dunes of Egypt, they had traveled and warred as much as any empire nation long before the Conqueror was born.

They tolerated men for one purpose, and one purpose alone.

Dual cultivation.

VS

“The wolf stalks the young maiden. But she is only hungry, and it is wounded and starved. It can not catch her, no matter how it tries. She was never too slow to hunt, this girl, neither too weak nor too blind - only now and forever too kind. The maiden dances through the woods, always just outside the wolf’s reach.

“Eventually, its wounds and empty stomach bring it down for her. It lays dim-eyed in the dirt, panting and bleeding as the arrows do their work.

“Against all better judgment, the maiden turns back to it.”

VS

Inside the temple of the Blind Maiden, where sisters of the Amazon faith come on dead moon nights to pay their respects and honor the natural phenomena that defines their journey, there is a shadowed grove containing two pools. In one pool is a potent poison, capable of killing all but the most resilient initiates in moments. In the other pool is the antidote.

Though the positions of the pools don’t change, their contents do. The questions of how and why are a portion of the mystery that confounds all who follow the Blind Maiden’s faith. The dichotomy is foundational.

Embedded in the shadows of the grove, carved into the bark of its trees and reflected on the surface of its pools, there are suggestions of the divinity that had once hunted and danced in the moon’s silver light. A hunter and a midwife. A poisoner and a physician - both the ailment and the cure.

No matter how much man reviles woman, and regardless of how much woman reviles man in turn, the fact remains that neither can exist without the other. Life springs from the two pools joined. The mingling of the father and the mother, this primordial exchange, is the first and most common basis for the phenomena known as dual cultivation. Though, of course, it is not the only one.

Dual cultivation is at every level an exchange. An exchange of the body’s fluid humors, and often, yes, the vital essences that blend to form a child. But beyond that, an exchange of the minds’ principles and higher ideals. An exchange of the hearts’ passions, its joys and sorrows alike. And of course, an exchange of the soul’s ravenous desires. It is called dual cultivation for a reason. It is more than just a lifegiving act.

It is more than just manifest desire. It is a form of refinement all its own.

However, while dual cultivation is by definition an exchange, it is not necessarily an equal exchange. The Amazon is known by many names, and few of them are kind. Her first and most venemously spoken title is Man-Eater.

It is not an inaccurate one.

VS

“The maiden is hungry, and even in its sorry state the wolf is large enough to feed her for a month. But she is kind, too, and she fears the taking of a life.

“So although it snaps and claws when she reaches out to it, although it snarls at her soft words, she waits outside the wolf’s reach until it’s lost the energy to fight her. And then, while its dull eyes watch her, she tugs the arrows from its back and fills the rancid wounds with herbs and honey.

“The maiden is hungry, but she is kind, so she gives what little she has gathered to the wolf. It isn’t much. Hardly enough to be called a morsel - a handful of berries. It is enough.

“When she returns the next day with hunger in hand, the wolf is gone.”

VS

Dual cultivation is, fittingly enough, a double-edged sword. It is possible to take more than is given, to drink deeply from the pool of another’s advancement and surrender only a drop from your own, but that is not necessarily a benefit.

The fruits of refinement are sweet, and at the same time they are bitter. A cultivator carries within themselves both the poison and the cure, and it is impossible to drink of one without also drinking of the other. It is all too easy to consume, to devour, when that first sweet drop of vitality touches the tongue. But it is just as easy to overindulge, and to succumb to what lurks deeper in the blood.

The Amazons of the Blind Maiden Cult, and the Amazons alone, have found the solution to this problem. They’ve found it in twin pools at a shadowed grove. One pool a poison, and one pool the cure.

When an Amazon has found herself a man worthy of giving her a daughter, she exchanges discourse of a deeper kind with him and drinks as deeply as she pleases. When the child has settled in her stomach and the fruits of her advancement have taken root in her soul, she returns to the temple of her ancestors and submerges herself in the pool of her choice.

Poison or panacea. In either case, the result is the same. The bitter impurities of man are purged, and what remains is the sweet fruit of the sister soul. It is no coincidence that the Amazons give birth to daughters and never sons. It is not by mistake that each generation of warrior women stands taller than the last, stronger and wilder than those that came before them.

It is blind design.

This is how the Amazons have advanced for centuries. Theirs is a pure line of true succession, each branch better than the one that came before it. It is the foundation they’ve built their cultural identity upon. It is only natural that their royal line of Queens would be the epitome of this sacred trend. It is to be expected that the Queen would stand tallest, strongest, and wildest of them all. It is demanded that her daughter be even more so than her.

For this reason, among others, the Amazon Queen is most selective of all her sisters when it comes to partners in dual cultivation. Hers is a line of blood so pure and strong that only a king’s essence will do. The father must surpass the grandfather if the daughter is to exceed her mother. It is a heavy expectation, and with every generation it grows heavier still.

By the time Queen Minythyia is ready to take on that daunting task herself, there is only one man in the world fit to spur her people forward. The Greeks won’t speak his name. Instead, they call him the Conqueror.

The Queen assembles three hundred sisters and travels to Verkana to visit the Conqueror in his camp. When she leaves thirteen days later, she is pregnant with a girl.

VS

“Time passes. The maiden carries on with her kindness, foraging and finding just enough to remain hungry instead of starving. It is a precarious balance, and one day an illness upends it. Having never known abundance, she has no excess food to fall back on while bedridden. Without food to nourish her, the illness sinks its fangs into her and doesn’t let go.

“It is in that state, while she’s at the mercy of the world around her, that the wolf finds the maiden once again.”

VS

Minythyia’s daughter is born healthy and whole, and she has all of her mother’s finest features. The pewter city of the Amazons celebrates for thirteen days and thirteen nights, declaring her Queen of Queens, blood of the Conqueror and Amazons combined.

Rumors and speculation as to her future abound through the city for years after her birth. The most popular prediction is that she’ll outstrip her mother by a foot’s length at the fullness of her height. Thirteen feet tall - one for every day it took to conceive her.

By the time Minythyia’s daughter turns thirteen, she is only five feet tall. At that same age the Queen had stood at nearly seven feet.

Every year the daughter doesn’t grow is another mark against the Queen. Every year another drop of poison. The prideful title given to her upon her birth, Queen of Queens, blood of the Conqueror, dwindles on the lips of her sisters until it falls entirely out of use. Until, years later, it returns as an insult. Queen of Queens, blood of the Conqueror. The words don’t change, but the intent behind them becomes an ugly thing.

When Minythyia’s daughter reaches the fullness of her natural growth, bolstered by all the treasures of the Amazons and their Blind Maiden Cult, she is only six feet tall.

The Queen of the Amazons stands taller than her sisters in all ways, and the expectations heaped upon her are heavier as a result. It is expected that her daughter will exceed her, because her daughter is the living symbol of the next generation. If the heiress stands taller, so too will the rest of the young blood.

But if nothing else, if nothing else at all, they have to stand as equals. If the daughter can’t stand eye-to-eye with the mother, then they will never progress as a people. They will never reclaim the glorious heights of the Amazonomachy. Never be themselves again outside of nightfire stories.

Minythyia’s daughter isn’t just inferior to her mother. She is inferior to her sisters in the Amazon city as well. In the crystalline pool of that pure and royal bloodline, she is undeniably other. A taint that cannot be ignored.

A single drop of poison.

When the Tyrant Riot comes to Nkri and claims the Queen as his due, it is almost a relief. The warrior sisters of ages past had fought tooth and nail every time that a man had dared to think himself equal to one of theirs. The Amazons had waged horrific, bloody war because a man had possessed the audacity to take one of their sisters from her home. But when the Tyrant Riot takes Minythyia in his hand, they turn their eyes away from her. They let him go.

She isn’t Minythyia, Queen of the Amazons, by that point. She hasn’t been for years. Her sisters have given her a new name behind their closed doors and in the silence of their shadowed groves, whispering just loud enough for her to hear them.

Thalestris. The Despoiler.

On his way out, dragging the Queen across the ground by her hair as if she wasn’t twice his size, the Tyrant Riot spots a young woman just shorter than himself and is struck by the shortness of her stature. He asks the Despoiled Queen who she is, and Thalestris spits out an answer.

“She is nothing. She is no one.”

The Tyrant Riot gives the young maiden a sympathetic glance.

“Mothers, eh?”

And then he’s gone, and the Despoiled Queen gone with him.

VS

“The wolf stalks out of the woods just as it had all that time ago, but it is a different beast now. It is healthy and whole, its wounds healed and its hunger fed. It is strong. The maiden knows at once that she has no chance of escaping it. She doesn’t have the strength to stand anymore, let alone run. She’s ill, and she’s starving. She needs food.

“The wolf moves closer, and lo - there’s half a rabbit in its mouth.”

VS

With her mother gone and only a single living heiress left behind, Queendom falls to Ivy.

Her aunts have other plans. They make a swift and punishing case against her - they bring a dozen standards to bear against her, and Ivy falls short on every single one. They levy her youth against her, her inexperience, her lack of wisdom and purpose. They turn her peers against her, which was a work half-done already. And in the end it is all unnecessary work, because the most important point was proven from the start.

The armor doesn’t fit her.

Thalestris’ older sister, eldest of the royals, assumes the role of Queen instead. She has three daughters already, and each of them is on their way to being greater than her - perhaps even greater than the Despoiler before her fall.

Ivy is allowed to retain her royal status, but she is an outsider in her own city. They treat her like she’s poison, because as far as they’re concerned she is, and every day that passes her heart grows a bit more poisonous to match their view of her. She comes to resent them. She almost comes to hate them. But in the end, her shame outweighs her resentment. No matter how much she tries to hate the strangers that are meant to be her sisters, she finds she only hates herself more.

It wasn’t her choice to be born this way, but that hardly changes things. The branch is still dead. The line of succession has been broken, and it was broken by her.

The man that gives Ivy a daughter is no king, but then, she’s no queen either. So long as her daughter can stand eye-to-eye with her, she’ll be content. Even if she can’t, Ivy promises the growing bump in her stomach that she’ll never be treated the way Ivy was by her own mother.

Even still, she can’t help but hope her daughter will be more than her. She can’t hope helping that she’ll stand above, and right the wrongs that Ivy’s existence has wrought on the branches of their line.

The Despoiler’s granddaughter is born happy and whole, with all her mother’s best features.

Her name is Anastasia.

Somewhere in the poison of her heart, Ivy finds a mother’s love for her daughter. She raises her daughter to be everything she could not be, to be even more than her grandmother was at her height, and when Anastasia stands eye-to-eye with her for the very first time she nearly bursts apart with pride. Even though she never grows beyond that, Ivy never loves her any less. She’s worth more than her grandmother and all her great aunts combined.

But in the end, even she is not able to cleanse Ivy of her resentment. Try as she might, the young physician never finds a cure to their shared affliction. And even if she did, it would only feed the true root of her mother’s poisonous resolve.

No matter what Thalestris may have said, and regardless of what her aunts had told her, Ivy desires Queendom. It is her impossible hunger. The ivory height that she strives for every day, no matter how far it might be from her reach. Every day she strains for the edges of her limits, and every day thereafter she strives to move beyond them. Every day she grows stronger. Every day she starves.

Until one day opportunity arrives - marching in cadence on her city, and flying the proud eagle standard of Rome.

VS

“The maiden recognizes the wolf as the one she’d helped before, and then she sees the rabbit in its mouth. She mourns the small creature’s death, but she is so hungry that she can’t stop her mouth from watering at the sight of it. She realizes the wolf has come back to repay her kindness.”

VS

The men of the Republic are unimpressive in stature, almost diminutive compared to the warrior women of Nkri, and for this reason the Queen takes their legions lightly.

It is a mistake.

The Romans fight like stubborn mules. They band together, each of them of a height with or shorter than their opponents in the Amazon city, and yet their strength together drives the sister bands into the ground. It is as baffling as it is terrifying. And even worse than that, they are informed.

They know of Ivy, and they seek her out. Though it was her intent to make use of them from the moment they came marching up from Egypt, it hardly feels at all like her plan when she joins the legion’s captain in his tent and is presented with an offer. A possible future.

Queen Ivy of the Amazons. Friend to the Republic.

The Romans divide, and they seek to conquer. It’s simply what they do. Ivy learns that lesson and many more in the months that follow. When she takes the field against her aunts for the very first time, to Roman chants of ‘Queen! Queen! Queen!’, the hatred they’ve felt for her all along comes roaring to the surface. Ivy isn’t surprised at all to see it.

Ivy is surprised when a portion of her sisters take her side.

As summer turns to fall, the legions wage a war of three kinds on the city of Nkri - they bleed them in the field with swords, spears, and shield walls. They starve them in their homes, surround their city and hunt down all calls for aid with trained eagles. And perhaps most effectively, they poison their hearts against their own sisters. Propaganda, the captain informs her one night in the shared comfort of his cot, is the purest poison of them all. Untraceable. Untreatable. And if applied properly, it only takes a drop to do its work.

A path to heaven presents itself to the Caustic Queens, a path forward for Ivy and her Anastasia. The Romans bleed Ivy’s aunts of their forces in three different ways, and every sister that defects to her banner is another point proven. It is another wrong made right. A balm to her soul.

When it becomes clear that the Romans will prevail, and her alongside them, Ivy offers Anastasia’s hand in marriage to the captain’s son. He is a strong young man, for a Roman, and they get along well enough. It is an unspeakable departure from tradition, but what’s one more after all of this?

Ivy takes the field the next day in the highest spirits since the day of her daughter’s birth. She meets the eyes of her third oldest aunt across the bloody fields that had once been idyllic forest groves and sees her victory in the woman’s hateful glare. She knows that victory will come soon. It might come today.

Amazon meets Amazon in a thunderous clash. The legions of Rome surge forward to bolster the Caustic Queen, certain of their success.

And then thunder roars above their heads, and lightning pries open the heavens.

VS

“The ill maiden reaches gratefully for the gift of food the wolf has brought her - and cries out when the wolf tilts back its head and swallows the rest of the rabbit down.

“Why?” she asks, distraught. “Why did you come here if not to help me?”

“Then she sees the other wolves creeping in from all around her. And in that moment, before they tear her limb from limb, she understands something that she should have known from the beginning. An animal is an animal, and it was Actaeon’s own dogs that ate him in the end. Respect the wild predators of this earth, but do not ever trust them. Waste not your kindness on them.

“And never feed a starving wolf.”

VS

“MY FELLOW SOLDIERS.”

The sound of it is deafening, truly deafening. Every syllable is a crack of rolling thunder, and the pressure alone sends Heroic Amazons staggering. Every mortal woman on the field without a fire burning in her eyes collapses to the ground, unable to hold her body up.

Ivy has fallen to one knee before she realizes what’s happened, and her aunt is no better off across from her. Both of their weapons lay forgotten in the dirt. Her aunt’s ears are bleeding. She realizes hers are as well. When Ivy casts her panicked gaze around, taking stock of her forces, she finds the men of Rome not flat on their faces like she’d expected of them.

Every Roman soldier is standing at attention, right fist pressed to their chest, and every single one of them is staring up at heaven.

It is a monstrous effort, but Ivy burns her heart’s blood and raises her head to follow their gaze.

“MY NAME IS GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR. HEAR ME NOW, AND KNOW THAT ROMA HAS BEEN BETRAYED.”

A colossus of storm clouds and seething light in the shape of a man looms above the Amazon city of Nkri - no, it looms above the Roman legions fighting for control of the city. Narrow eyes of flashing lightning regard the attentive men of the Republic with an intensity that strikes even the captain to his core. The man she’d seen turn her city inside out with such steady, maddening surety, stares up at heaven now with clenched teeth and a white-knuckled fist denting the breastplate over his chest.

“CARTHAGE IS RISEN FROM THE ASHES. THERE ARE KNIVES LURKING IN EVERY SHADOW. NO PROVINCE IS SAFE. NO LEGION IS STRONG ENOUGH ALONE. NIGHT HAS FALLEN ON THE CITY OF ROME.”

Another deafening roar of thunder batters her ears, this time rising from the earth as the Roman legionaries howl their disbelief and outrage.

The stormcloud colossus bares its teeth in furious empathy, its lightning eyes flashing, and raises a single titanic hand. Ivy sees tendrils of what look like ink wheeling between the fingers of its hand - crows. From this distance, there have to be thousands of them. Thousands upon thousands of cawing crows.

“NOW GO,” the colossal specter of Gaius Julius Caesar commands, and its stormcloud hand clenches into a fist like it's gripping the skies above.

Like it's searching for a gap.

A sound comes that is not noise, but a pure lightning sensation that starts from the base of her spine and branches out to the tips of her fingers and burns their nails black. Ivy watches in silent horror alongside her aunt as a jagged line appears in the skies above, pried open by Caesar’s fist.

“SEEK SAFER SHORES.”

The Tyrant of the West tears a hole in the skies above, and the legions of Rome fall up into it like the axis of the world itself have shifted.

While they plummet up, screaming and thrashing futilely against Caesar’s will, the colossus addresses them one last thundering time.

“DRIVE THE TRAITORS FROM YOUR RANKS. STAND READY WHEN THE CAPTAIN CALLS. KNOW THAT GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR WILL RETURN FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU.”

The stormcloud colossus smiles grimly.

“STAND PROUD, AND KNOW THE SUN OF ROME WILL RISE-”

From the blackened skies surrounding it, a thousand blades of searing lightning runs Caesar’s apparition through.

With a sound like the heavens and earth themselves screaming out in agony, the stormcloud colossus bursts apart in a final mad cacophony of thunder and light. In the next instant, the gaping wound in the skies above slams shut and takes the Roman soldiers with it. The soldiers, their camp followers, their siegeworks and beasts of war. Everything vanishes into the skies above. Everything but a single eagle standard, planted firmly in the ground where the captain had last stood.

For a short and endless eternity, not a single Amazon moves.

When Ivy turns and runs for her daughter, her aunt makes no move to stop her.

VS

“My little Ivy, you seem upset. Is that not how you thought this story would end?”

1.114 [The Caustic Queen] (Pt.3)

The Caustic Queen

“Who are you, really?”

The Young Griffon asked the question without suspicion or any particular heat, and his pneuma did not stir from its work - but neither did he take the small clay jar from her outstretched hand. She leaned closer with it, waving the cloth-covered top under his nose so he could smell the sweet gold therein. He ignored it. Humming, she pulled back and knelt across from him.

Between them, a cultivator lay wheezing in the cool sands of the Olympic Stadium’s arena pit. The man appeared young enough, in his prime as most cultivators did, but she recognized him. His name was Chilon and he was closer to a century old than not. An eighth rank Philosopher, which made him senior to most in the world. Here in the pit, though, he was junior to all but one.

“What have you done to him?” she asked curiously, folding her legs primly and shifting her onyx silks so they pooled around her in the sand.

“What portion of a truth can be lies before it becomes no truth at all?”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“At what point did Theseus’ ship cease to be his own? Was it the day he died or was it when the final rotten plank that carried him to glory was torn out and fresh wood slotted in its place?” Incorporeal hands of Griffon’s intent moved up and down the wounded Philosopher’s body, prodding and digging at different parts of his body and massaging his pneuma into Chilon’s flesh. Without looking up from his work, he continued, “Or will it always be his ship, even after all the stars have fallen out of heaven?”

She considered it briefly. It was a common thought experiment for junior Philosophers, and one she hadn’t thought about in years. She’d never heard of it used in this sort of context, though.

“It isn’t a fair comparison,” she decided.

“Ho?”

“The argument can be made that any ship is Theseus’ ship so long as to Theseus it belongs.” Whether or not a ship could still belong to a man after his passing was a sticking point of the topic, but in this case it didn’t matter. “Owning a ship is not the same thing as knowing the truth. The former is yours to alter as you choose, and so long as it can sail it will retain its core identity. Its purpose remains the same. The truth has no stated purpose. It simply is.”

“A ship has no purpose on its own,” Griffon pointed out, digging his flesh and blood fingers into the gap between two of Chilon’s ribs and frowning at the Philosopher’s pained gasp. “It won’t push itself into the water, nor work its own oars against the waves. If we chose to keep our ships on dry land and live in them like homes, then that would be their purpose. We decide their purpose. Isn’t that so?”

Despite herself, she found herself considering it and posing her own question in return. “If ten thousand men sail their ships over open seas and one man keeps his instead in the shipyard as a home, are each of those uses equal?”

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t believe that,” she said knowingly. He snorted and finally glanced up at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Is that so?”

“The question you’re asking isn’t whether Theseus’ ship was still his after every portion of it was replaced. The question you’re asking is whether it was still a ship at all.”

He tilted his head.

“If every portion of a ship is stripped away, piece by piece, and replaced with a portion of a house, at the end of this process there will be no question at all as to its identity. It will be a home, clear as candlelight.” She waited for him to nod, and continued. “What if, then, the very first piece taken from the ship is a plank straight from its hull?”

“It’s made worthless,” Griffon murmured.

A ship couldn’t sail without a water-tight hull, that much was common sense.

“It can still be used as a home,” she pointed out. “More so the further the changes progress. And though it will never sail again, surely it is still a ship? After all, you’ve only taken out a single piece of it.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t appear shocked, or particularly enlightened. If anything, she seemed to have confirmed a thought he’d already been thinking.

“I don’t believe so,” she agreed. Whatever else could be done with a ship, the greatest of the purposes ascribed to it was its ability to sail. Without that ability, it lost its substance and became something else.

She supposed the truth was much the same.

“What is the purpose of a truth, Griffon?” she asked him curiously.

“To shed light.”

“How poetic,” she said, her lips curling. He ignored the light jab. “Then if we compare it to the ship, if we were to remove a bench instead of a portion of the hull, it would still be seaworthy, wouldn’t it? In that case, a great many portions of the truth could be substituted for lies. So long as it sheds light-”

“No.”

Oh?

“It’s more delicate than that. It’s a ship made of papyrus, each sheet thinner than a fingernail’s width.”

Of course, a ship like that could still float. However, depending on what replaced it…

“What is a lie, then?”

The Young Griffon’s lip lifted in a sneer. Who it was for, she couldn’t say.

“A lead weight.”

In both of their minds’ eyes, the paper ship sank.

“Perhaps the truth is closer to a cup of wine, then,” she suggested. “And every portion of a lie the poison.” Griffon glanced up at her, his scarlet eyes piercing, but she merely smiled.

“A drop is enough to spoil the cup,” he completed the sentiment, and the words resonated with the virtue in her soul.

Purity.

TCQ

“What are you doing here?” Solus asked her, releasing his hold on her neck and settling wearily back down beside his alchemical furnace. It was the only furnishing in the cave, though there were piles of trinkets and silks along with clay jugs of wine and food stacked along the edges of the mountain alcove.

“I came to see how you were doing,” she said simply. He grimaced.

“Every day is a new joy,” he responded. “I told you to give the honey to Griffon. It isn’t safe for you to be seen associating with me.”

“I’d be far from the first,” she observed.

“I haven’t met with your Tyrant yet. You’re still abducted. If they follow you up here-”

“You think I was seen?” she asked archly, and he exhaled in dim amusement.

“Fair enough. Why the music?” In the background, invisible now even to her vision, the Dancing Muse continued to strum her lyre.

“So I wouldn’t be seen,” she answered truthfully. Whether it was his exhaustion or the idea of her that existed within his head, he accepted that without further comment.

“The honey?”

She spread her empty hands apologetically, and cursed herself for not carrying a jar of mad honey in her paradox space. It was an uncommon poison, found further east than she cared to go ever again, but it would have made this endeavor a simple one.

“Already delivered, I’m afraid,” she said. The Roman closed his eyes in brief exasperation, then nodded and returned to his work.

“You’ve seen me,” he dismissed her, dipping a spoon of lead into the alchemical furnace and stirring its contents steadily. The liquid within was a deep red, the color of blood. When she leaned in closer to inhale from its vapors, the intensity of the aroma made her nostrils burn. Spices, herbs, and potent wine.

When he didn’t immediately push her away, she settled to the cave floor beside the Roman, folding her slipper-clad feet delicately beneath her and shifting her midnight black robes so they pooled around her.

“What are you really here for, Anastasia?” he asked her. His voice was low. Rough. Despite being only a Philosopher, he was still a bit taller than her. A testament to how small she’d been before ascending to the Heroic Realm as much as to his own stature. She let that drop of bitter poison fall away to join the rest and mustered a concerned expression.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. It was the truth, too.

Though perhaps not how he imagined it.

TCQ

“You ignored my question,” she said, watching with some concern as the wounded Philosopher’s eyes rolled in his head. Every breath was more haggard than the last, and they’d started to sound wet.

Griffon nodded as if it was to be expected. “You ignored mine first.”

Who are you, really?

“May I help?” she asked, reaching out for the wounded sophist. Chilon’s eyes locked on her, and though he couldn’t speak, he nodded frantically. Pankration hands brushed hers away.

“What does a Roman legion’s camp look like from the inside?” Griffon asked her. She stared at him.

“Is this really the time?”

“What does a man’s eyes look like when he dies?”

“You can’t be this stubborn,” she said. Then realized what she had just said, and to whom. “You’d rather kill this man than let me avoid your question?”

He smiled sharply at her, his hands working all the while to mend a wound he lacked the experience to treat. “You’d rather let this man die than tell me the truth?”

She could have forced him off the sophist, but he’d have fought her. And though everything within her said that she could tear him down to bloody scraps of flesh with nothing but a scalpel and two fingers, that glint in his eyes made her wonder. He appeared no greater to her senses than Solus, and yet Solus was himself. Who could say how much of this was talent and how much was disguise-

The wounded Philosopher reached out weakly for her, seeking her salvation, and her master’s words rang like a bell in her mind.

“Either help, or do no harm.”

“Fine,” she conceded. When Griffon’s pankration hands still did not draw back, she elaborated, “A question for a question, same as before.” The day they’d thrown dice in Scythas’ room, and the day she had grown first fully acquainted with the Scarlet Son of Alikos. He inclined his head, and the limbs of his violent intent receded to give her space.

She identified the issue at once. The right lung had been punctured by a strike that had broken his ribs, and the damage was severe enough that it might pose a real threat to the sophic man if left untreated. Experimentally, she urged a portion of her pneuma through his channels, and watched closely as the muscles seized and he choked on his next breath.

“Stop,” Griffon ordered her, but she already had. “I tried that. His pneuma is fighting mine. Direct intervention just makes it worse.”

“Did you ask him to stop?”

“Obviously. My turn.” Oh, how sly- “Who are you, really?”

“My name is Anastasia,” she said, spreading her fingers out and inhaling slowly. “I am a Heroine of the Blind Maiden Cult, born and raised east of the Aegean Sea in the nation known to most as Lydia.”

Chilon’s reaction to outside interference was reflexive, like the hitching of a breath. She had seen him try to control it, but the wound was a painful one and he didn’t have the look of a seasoned combatant. He wasn’t used to pain like this. She could knock him out, or drug him, but there was a kinder solution that she could provide him.

Fortunately for the battered Philosopher, it was a dead moon night.

[The blind eye turns.]

This time, her pneuma entered his body like a ghost. When she suffused his punctured lung with it, cleansing the excess blood and bile from the wound and urging the ribs to mend, Chilon gagged and writhed like he’d been stabbed. But his pneuma did not clash against hers and disrupt her work, because it was as if it wasn’t there at all.

When she leaned back and clapped her hands clean, satisfied, she could see that Griffon desperately wanted to ask her what she had done. But it was her turn to ask a question now. She waited for him to see the results of her work for himself, propping the coughing Philosopher up with his pankration hands, and then struck.

“Why did you really come to this city, Griffon?”

He answered without hesitation.

“To see the Oracle.”

She raised an eyebrow, and he grimaced ever so slightly. In each of their minds’ eyes, the papyrus ship sank.

TCQ

“You’re playing with fire, Solus. Now more than ever.”

“I know.”

“This conflict, these factions - they may feel like they’re confined to this mountain, but they’re not.”

“I know.”

“If you go any further than this, you’ll be going the distance. No matter who claims the indigo throne, no matter by what means, a portion of what comes will fall on your shoulders. Do you understand that?”

Finally, he lifted his eyes from his elixir. They were dark gray, like storm clouds. Lightning flashed in their depths, faint but unmistakable to anyone with the proper sight to see it.

“I know, Anastasia.”

He truly thought he did. She could see it in him. It made her sick. It made her want to kill him.

“Why?” she asked him quietly. Terpsichore plucked a single string, and its quivering note hung in the air alongside the question.

The Roman, the Raven, the Revenant known as Solus glared with such fury that for a moment she thought he’d snatch her by the throat again and choke her where she sat. But that rage wasn’t for her. The lightning in his eyes was focused on a distant point over her shoulders, beyond this cave beneath the immortal storm crown, beyond the Half-Step City, and beyond the Ionian Sea. Solus glared murderously to the west, and she saw the fullness of his heritage clearer than ever before.

“Carthage must be destroyed,” he intoned, and the rage beneath the measured words made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. “The legions of Rome are dead and gone, and I lack the strength alone to see it done. And so I’ve come.”

Longevity led to wisdom. Wisdom opened the eyes to options. Options that could only come from lived experience, from past failures and successes. The longer a cultivator lived, the more tools they had at their disposal.

The Roman was driven, and he was skilled. That much even she could admit. But he was so very young, and his options were so very few. Backed into a corner as he was, he did the only thing he knew to do. The same thing that every Roman did when presented with an enemy too great to overcome with his own strength. He turned them against one another.

He divided.

And he sought to conquer.

The path forward presented itself to her, and the Caustic Queen stepped onto it without hesitation.

“Your legions may be gone, Son of Rome,” she murmured softly in the silence. “But they aren’t dead yet.”

She gazed into the storm.

TCQ

“I came here in search of something that may no longer exist,” Griffon corrected himself, and the truth of that seemed to suit him better. He leaned back on his elbows in the sand, brushing long golden hair from his face. His expression was pensive. “The Heroes I’ve come searching for are all dead or lesser to themselves. The Kings and Queens of glory are nothing but Tyrants. This world was golden bright once, but here I’ve come to find it iron. The world that I’ve desired all along is a cold and broken shell.”

He turned and spat into the sand. His companion, the Philosopher named Chilon, had an almost understanding look in his eyes as he worked to fully control his breathing now that the worst of his wound was healed.

Anastasia considered his frustration for all of a moment.

“Then mend it.”

Griffon scoffed. “You can’t mend the dead.”

“Why not?”

Scarlet eyes turned and settled on her.

“It is a cultivator’s nature to seek impossible heights, is it not?” she asked him with no particular expectation. He nodded slowly, turning it over in his mind. “A cultivator that walks the Physician’s Path remains a cultivator. Their goals are still outrageous. Their sublimation is the same. We’re all climbing the same mountain in the end.”

Griffon sat straight up.

“A Hero is a slayer of monsters,” he realized. She smiled, pleased. For all his faults, he really wasn’t a bad student.

“And if we can kill what can not die, what’s to say we can’t also mend what can not be mended?”

“Common sense,” Chilon offered in a raspy voice.

Griffon laughed and laughed.

TCQ

“What?” Solus asked the Caustic Queen, and she knew at once that her instinct had been correct. He didn’t understand.

He hadn’t heard. Somehow, he was the only Roman in the world that hadn’t heard the call.

For the first time in her entire life, the Fates were smiling down on her.

The Roman lurched up to one knee, eyes riotous with lightning wrath, and his paltry pneuma flooded the cave. “Anastasia. What did you say?”

She didn’t respond with words. She had something far better than that, after all.

The Caustic Queen struck the Raven with the weight of her lived experience, and the voice of a nation tore the world open once more.

“MY FELLOW SOLDIERS.”

Solus fell back, washed off his feet by the memory of the worst day of her life. The day the Republic lost their shining star.

The day that Julius Caesar delivered his final edict.

She delivered it in the fullness of its majesty, with a crystalline clarity and a fullness of emotion that no sophic storyteller could hope to match. And while he was swept up in its waves, she reached out and held a finger over his unattended furnace.

A single drop of liquid gathered like dew at the tip of her finger and then dropped, falling into the simmering elixir. It didn’t leave a ripple.

1.114 [The Caustic Queen] (Pt.2)

The Caustic Queen

The Roman’s name was Solus. She had never seen him before the kyrios’ funeral because he’d never stepped foot in the Half-Step City before that day. He’d brought a student with him, a young Philosopher just as young as him that called himself Griffon. They both wore the scarlet cult attire of the Rosy Dawn Cult.

There was no place in the city of Olympia for an agent of Damon Aetos, to say nothing of a Roman. Few would notice their passing, and none would mourn it. If anything, the Burning Dusk would thank her for her efforts. Polyzalus’ gratitude was a boon even her queen could not deny the value of, now more than ever since the kyrios’ passing.

It would be quick. The man, the boy, had taken her by surprise in the chaos of the funeral rites. It would not happen again. The next they met, he would be the one in the dirt. Looking up at her in pitiful, impotent fear and anger. Disgraced, as all his kind had been disgraced in the end. Impotent, as all Romans were.

Or so she had planned.

From the day that he arrived, the foreigner wrapped the Raging Heaven’s significant men and women around him like a cloak. He held the late kyrios’ favored Heroes in his palm with eerie surety, as if it was only natural that they would be dancing to the tune of a lowly Sophic cultivator from a land of savage conquerors. And dance they did. It made it difficult to reach him with any sort of subtlety, especially with the catamite in his grip - the Howling Wind Cult’s young prodigy was always listening.

But difficult was not the same as impossible. Solus was not always alone, and he made no effort to hide his presence when he was. Centuries had taught the Caustic Queen patience. She watched and she waited. She measured her might against the bizarre amalgam of his refinement, and found him wanting in her mind.

When the inevitable opportunity presented itself to her, she struck without hesitation.

TCQ

“And you failed. He beat you back again.”

Thalestris looked down on her daughter with such contempt that the shadowed grove itself reacted. The trees bent and twisted away from the kneeling crow as if in disgust, like she might taint them with her disgrace. The bright eyes of predators leered out at her from the cover of their shade, regarding her as prey.

The Despoiled Queen’s daughter stared silently ahead. Her thoughts were nearly as still as her body, as silent as she could make them. Inside the Queen’s domain, everything was hers to keep.

If her daughter acknowledged the truth too boldly, even in her mind, Thalestris might hear it.

So she very carefully did not recall the truth of what had happened that night. The night the Roman went to the temple of the Father and anointed himself and his student in starlight marrow.

The night the Raven spread its wings.

TCQ

She hadn’t been the only one to take note of the Roman. She hadn’t been the only one to want him dead, either.

If she had been a younger woman, she might have stepped in the moment the pair of lesser assassins exploded out of the olive oil pool at the feet of the Father’s statue. The ensuing brawl was short and brutally one-sided, but for those short moments the Roman was distracted. She could have almost certainly struck him down before any of the four noticed. A drop of poison would have been enough.

The Roman sneered at his companion, and she felt the contempt in him like a slap to her own face. “I refuse to skulk around like a Crow, picking at corpses and offal.”

And oh, she was tempted.

But she waited, even so. In the end, she was rewarded for her patience.

Longevity was guaranteed past a certain point of refinement - survival, on the other hand, was not. The oldest cultivators were the wisest because the fools always died young. Kronos taught a new lesson every day. Those that learned, lived. Caution was queen.

She had ascertained the Roman’s true age the moment her spiritual poison entered his veins. Twenty years old. It wasn’t a question of if he would make a foolish mistake, but when.

The Roman and the Young Griffon spoke freely while they looted the corpses of their would-be killers, plainly revealing their ignorance as they fumbled for the most basic understanding of the realm which they inhabited. Fresh Philosophers, both of them.

She had been kicked like a dog and thrown through a stone wall by a fresh Philosopher.

The Caustic Queen bit her lip until she drew blood, but she controlled her ugly impulses and waited for her time. Soon after, it came. She watched with equal parts anticipation and incredulity as the Roman cracked open the ink-black bones of a crow construct and sucked the marrow from its center.

Young and ignorant and foolish.

She did not hesitate. While the two young men collapsed under the onslaught of the Tyrant’s marrow, she lunged out of the shadowed arches lining the temple with a single rusted blade in her hand. The Roman first, and then the Scarlet Son-

At the very last moment, she heard the whistle of a falling blade and twisted sinuously in mid-air to dodge it. It cut a trailing strand of glossy black hair from her head, and she lashed out with her dagger and the full corrosion of her pneuma at the sudden assailant.

A clenched fist struck her in the face and white light exploded behind her eyes. She hit the ground outside the temple and bounced three times before she plunged into the Ionian.

When she resurfaced from the bottom of the sea, far enough beyond the breakwater that the stone locks of the great gorgon’s hair were only a distant sliver on the horizon, she was so furious that she tasted blood. Or perhaps that had been the punch. She glared hatefully across the sea, at the distant figure of the man that had preempted her. He’d sent her tumbling far enough that even a normal Heroic cultivator of her standing would have struggled to see him from this distance, but the huntresses of the Blind Maiden Cult had better eyes than most.

He sat cross-legged on the serpentine head of the breakwater gorgon’s hair that was furthest from the shore, the flames behind his eyes burning like torches in the night. The tip of his sword was buried in the stone and his right palm rested negligently on its pommel. His eyes roved left and right, searching for her, but before she could slip back under the waves and take advantage of that, her own flame betrayed her. His eyes met hers, and she realized too late that her tumble had torn the midnight veil from her face and exposed her eyes to the world.

The opposing Hero lifted his left hand in a lazy wave. The man was handsome, despite the faint imperfection of a scar trailing from the corner of his right eye to the bottom of his square chin. She glared daggers at him, willing him to die.

Then she noticed the color of the cloth beneath his cloak. It was red, though slightly darker than that of the cult attire worn by the Roman and his companion. A shade of scarlet that was sister to the dawn.

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk hooked a thumb back over his shoulder, in the direction of the distant temple they’d both been in just moments before. His eyes never left hers while his lips moved silently. He knew she could read them.

Don’t touch. You’ve poisoned enough wells already.

He allowed his true strength to uncoil like a serpent from its slumber, just for a moment, and steam rose up from the Ionian Sea for fathoms all around her as the heat of his pneuma washed over her. She had taken twenty-three steps up the stairway to heaven before the Butcher was even a bump in his mother’s stomach. She was his senior in every way that mattered but for one.

The searing glory of an Eighth Rank Hero boiled the Ionian Sea around the Caustic Queen, threatening to cook her like a fish. The rumors of his recent infirmity, it seemed, had been nothing more than that.

With longevity came prudence. The Caustic Queen dove back under the wine-dark waves of the Ionian and swam north until the boiling heat of the Butcher’s pneuma subsided. Her heart twisted and writhed inside her chest all the while. She’d lost her window of opportunity, but she hadn’t entirely failed. She had discovered something significant tonight, and all she’d had to pay for it was a mouthful of blood and some bruises.

Retreat was the wisest option. She knew that.

But longevity hadn’t yet cured her of her pride. The Caustic Queen added another drop of poison to her heart, and this one was for the Butcher.

TCQ

“I was preempted,” the crow whispered in her own defense, and that was true enough. She’d faithfully recounted her failure to the Elder of the Blind Maiden Cult faction knowing full well that she would be reviled for her weakness, and of all the shameful details she had omitted only one - the Butcher’s true identity.

That omission was a lie, but a small one. Only a drop.

“You were hunted,” Thalestris corrected her. Narrow green eyes pierced through her, stripped her of her anonymity and laid her bare before the Queen. “You thought you were the huntress, but you were blind.”

[The young man stalks the maiden, unaware of the huntress in his blind.]

She bit down on her tongue and held it. The Tyrant’s ire willed her to be silent, forcing her teeth together. But with effort, and with spite, she forced them back apart.

“I was hunted, yes. But the situation has changed.”

The pressure redoubled and snapped her mouth shut again, cutting her tongue against her teeth. Thalestris dipped her head in acknowledgement, the Tyrant’s long curtain of hair shifting with the motion. Her hair was glossy black, the same as the crow’s own, and most nights it caught the light of the moon and seemed to glow at its edges. Tonight, however, the night sky was blind.

“So it has. Before, this child was an annoyance to all of us. Now he is a threat to me.”

In defiance of all common sense, the scavenger known as Solus had done more than nip and claw at the influence of his betters. He had somehow, impossibly, drawn them to his side. Through means unknown, he had stepped into the lion’s den not once, twice, or even thrice, but four times, and every time he’d emerged unscathed.

The Howling Wind faction’s door had been darkened first. The Hurricane Hierophant, Aleuas Pyrrhos, had given favor to the Raven.

Second had come the Scattered Foam. The Hollow Satrap, Ptolemy the Savior, had given favor to the Raven.

Third then, the Broken Tide. The Lawgiver, Drakon, least kind of the lot to scavengers of his kind, had nonetheless given favor to the Raven.

Fourth and final - thus far - had been the Alabaster Isles. The Raven had stepped into the King’s golden domain without hesitation, and he’d left it with Midas’ favor.

There were eight Elders on the mountain, and only space for one to sit the indigo throne. There had been balance in that struggle, eight lines drawn and eight factions opposed. Now the Raven had drawn a line of his own, and four of eight stood behind it. How far their favor went was a question no one dared to ask, but for each of the Elders that still stood alone, even the suggestion of a league against them was unacceptable.

For Thalestris in particular, the current circumstances were even worse. She was the only woman of the eight, the only Queen to stake a claim on the indigo throne. Hers had been a steep climb from the start.

Now a student of Socrates had charmed four of her rivals to his side. The odds were bleaker than they’d ever been.

“But that isn’t what you meant, is it?” Thalestris continued. The Despoiled Queen leaned forward in her throne of bone and loomed over her daughter. “Tell me then, what has changed? What can you do for me, if anything at all? What are you worth?”

The same thing she’d always been worth, of course.

A single drop of poison.

TCQ

On that dead moon night, a huntress crept into the Raven’s nest. On nights like these, beneath the veil of the [Blind Eye Turned], she was like a ghost. Utterly invisible, forever downwind, a huntress with a knife poised. Until the moment she struck, no one would know she was there. Of course, if and when that veil was broken she’d be at the mercy of the Gadfly, or the Butcher, or whatever other horror the Roman had charmed to his side.

She hadn’t come here to die. So she kept her pneuma close, and in the silence of the night reached out with her soul for the warmth of a sister.

Terpsichore, she entreated, only to realize the Dancing Muse was already there by her side. The ephemeral woman had her translucent silks pulled up around her ankles, as if they’d make any sort of sound that could give them away. The Muse’s eyes danced merrily at the look the Caustic Queen gave her.

Ivy, the Muse whispered her own greeting. Again, as if the sound would be overheard by anyone else at all without her permission. Shall I set the mood?

Please.

Delightedly, the Muse manifested a lyre from the aether and drew her fingers smoothly across its strings. The chord it produced brought tears to her eyes.

The Raven turned abruptly from his alchemical furnace and caught the huntress by her throat. He didn’t call upon his pneuma, yet his grip was an order of magnitude stronger than it had been the night of the funeral.

She didn’t resist. She remained silent when he demanded to know who she was. Terpsichore strummed another chord, humming softly to herself, and the Roman known as Solus whipped his head around, questing for the source. He couldn’t see her, of course. That he had heard the Muse’s first chord at all had been intentional - he’d been included in this third veil, the one that stood above the veil of the Crow and the veil of the Blind Maiden both.

Fed up with her silence, Solus tore the veil away from her face. The storm vanished from his eyes.

“Anastasia?”

Ivy smiled.

1.114 [The Caustic Queen] (Pt.1)

[PATREON NOTE: This chapter was released to everyone because of the egregious hiatus since the last, but subsequent chapters will be released ahead of time on here. I can’t apologize enough for these last two months, and I can’t thank you all enough either for continuing to support me in spite of that. I appreciate you all, and hope to drown you in words going forward.]

§

The world is iron. It has been aeons since the Patriarch sequestered himself behind closed doors in the pursuit of greater insight. First the seasons passed, and then the years. Dynasties have risen and fallen in the interim. Time has worn the mountains down to rubble and swept family trees into the flames.

The Patriarch's estate fell to ruin long ago. No living member of the Sect has ever seen his face. His existence is legend more than fact. Even so, they honor his memory and entreat him as they can. Their hunger is a tragic thing.

Though it is a hopeless tradition, the youngest and most optimistic of them still make the trek to the sunken pit of his estate and toss their spirit stones into the yawning chasm. It is dark, and deep enough that they can't see the bottom of it. The latest in the long line of disciples casts their spirit stone into the abyss and whispers a silent prayer to their distant Ancestor.

When chapter?

There is never any answer, of course. No one is listening. No one ever was.

No one-

A ragged hand reaches up from the abyss and catches the falling stone. The disciple's brothers and sisters in the Sect run screaming from the ancient chasm.

The disciple stands frozen at the lip of the chasm while a second hand reaches out. This hand is not empty. In this hand, there is hope.

Behold, the Dead Ancestor rumbles from the depths. Somewhere down there, a spirit engine roars and malevolent yellow floodlights glare up at the disciple. A chapter.

§

The Caustic Queen

Cultivators lived long lives.

It was known that a crude woman could live to see a hundred years if she was both healthy and fortunate. The nature of refinement was continuous growth, the changes to the cultivator made greater and greater the further they advanced - one above matched ten below. That being said, there was a reason the true climb started at the second realm and not the first.

Civic cultivators tended to live longer than the average unrefined soul, but a century was still their limit.

A wise woman that understood her place in the world, standing at the peak of what the Peloponessians had dubbed the Sophic Realm, had taken twenty steps up the divine mountain. She had refined herself ten times as a Citizen, and then ten times again in the realm above, and her lifespan was extended accordingly. History showed that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be a thousand years old if the years were kind to her.

It followed that a Heroic soul at its peak could live ten thousand years, provided the Fates were kind. And if that was the case, then it held true that a Tyrant at the uppermost limits of their dominion could live for a hundred thousand. Provided the Fates were kind.

Beyond the mortal boundary of the Sophic Realm, the Fates were never kind.

But the distinction between ten lifetimes and a hundred, a hundred lifetimes and a thousand, was meaningless to the young soul that had yet to live even one to its limit. A cultivator's longevity was staggering, and it made them more in every way. Stronger. Wiser.

Hungrier.

The Despoiled Queen of the Amazons sat discontent upon her throne of ivy and bone, the Tyrant Thalestris towering over all that crept through her domain. If it were to come down to physical stature alone, she would tower over every soul in Olympia, including her rivals. The royal huntresses of the Blind Maiden Cult had always stood tall, even among other cultivators. The queen stood tallest of them all. Seated on her throne of elephant bone, Thalestris presented an image that transcended mortal authority. She looked greater than a Tyrant. Larger than mortality.

Yet here she sat, in the shadowed grove that the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult had so thoughtfully prepared for her three hundred years ago. Here she ruled, far from any game worth hunting. The only woman of her standing in the Raging Heaven Cult. Outnumbered and outcast.

She was the second oldest of her sisters, but the truest heir to the queens that came before her. In the Blind Maiden's hallowed temple, she was the only one of her generation that could stand eye-to-eye with the ancestral statues standing guard. Penthesilia's armor had fit her and only her. And so, young and old, all of her sisters had knelt for her anointment.

Thalestris had ruled for centuries. The weight of those years was carved into her soul, and she carried it with her wherever she went. Longevity had tempered her as surely as any cultivation technique. Longevity had given her perspective. It had given her sight, where before she had been blind. Her years had informed her of her purpose in the grander scope of the Amazons.

And longevity had tormented the Despoiled Queen when she failed in her pursuit of that purpose. For centuries after, and for centuries yet still to come.

There came a rustling of feathers in the shadow of her soul. Pursing her lips, the midnight messenger kneeling at the Despoiled Queen's feet laid the unkind thought to rest. It was not her place to question. Only to serve.

The cawing crow serves nine generations of Tyrants and their purposes.

Each of them that donned the midnight veil was at once a crow, unique and fragmented in their goals, and also the crow. Simultaneously the shard and the mosaic that the fragment had chipped away from. Beginning at the moment they took that starlight marrow into their bodies and swallowed it down, from the instant that they accepted the subjugation of the hungry hand behind it, they became something else. When the sun rose and they drew their midnight veils away from their faces, when the night was beaten back, they looked just the same as they had before. But the truth was in their blood.

It didn't take much. Even the briefest taste of starlight marrow was enough to make a crow out of a man.

One drop was enough to spoil the blood.

A year ago the Raging Heaven Cult had been home to nine Tyrants, eight elders and one lord above the lot. Now there were only eight, and the indigo throne sat empty beneath the immortal storm crown. It wouldn't be empty for long.

The Half-Step City was the hallowed nexus of the Free Mediterranean, the only city that had suffered neither famine nor war since the inception of her Olympic Games, and the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult was king within her walls. It was inevitable that the vacancy would be filled sooner than later - the indigo throne wouldn't be empty for long.

But who decided, in the end? A vote among eight elders would return eight results. Seniority was a reasonable consideration in any other institution in the world, but when it came to the elders of the Raging Heaven it was nearly a mark against them. After all, none of them had joined the cult willingly. What did seniority matter, when it only meant your knees were first to fall?

The ink-black bird that lurked within the shadows of her cloak cawed a soft warning.

Of course, she'd never say such a thing out loud.

The crow snapped its beak, and a portion of her pneuma vanished. The crow swallowed noisily and settled back to rest in her shadow.

… If the kyrios had named a successor upon his passing, that might have made things simpler. But he hadn't, and somehow in spite of his proclivities the man had left behind no heirs willing to claim his name. What, then, were they to do? The kyrios had chosen an unfortunate time to die. The Olympic Games had been only a few short months away the day of his passing, and now with the competitors at their door they were no closer to a consensus than they had been before. Soon enough the Elders' usurpers, the men and women that had taken up the mantles of kyrioi following their disanointments, would come to see the Games.

Naturally, they would be coming to weigh in on the question of succession just as well. The Elders of the Raging Heaven were each and every one of them mighty, each of them once a kyrios in their greater days, but the lords and ladies of the greater mystery cults were kyrioi today. Some of them would argue that that fact meant something. Some of them would offer themselves up as contenders instead.

"I won't allow it," the crow within her robes hissed in a woman's voice. It was the voice of the blind-eye turned, the one and only bellatrix to ever be abandoned by her sisters - left to rot alone in the city of Olympia following her subjugation.

"I'll tear this city down before I kneel to another man," Thalestris declared aloud, completing the sentiment.

"Of course," the midnight servant murmured. She was only a single chip of stone in the tessellate of the Despoiled Queen's influence, which itself was only a small section of the vast mosaic that was the Crow. Deference was all she could afford.

A vote was pointless, and a naked power struggle threatened the stability of every Elder's standing. What remained in the end? What was the only option any of the eight would tolerate?

A crow's diplomacy - cloak and dagger, and a thousand shifting shadows. They were only shards, but even the smallest jagged stone could leave its mark. A humble scavenger in the realms beneath Tyrannic couldn't hope to strike an Elder's tempered body, but they could chip away at their influence. They could undermine them in the smallest of ways. A crow's highest purpose was simple, yet profound in its impact.

Harass, distract, and goad. It was the best a scavenger could hope to accomplish, when they stood so far beneath the weakest of the eight Elders.

[They say that in the legions…]

No.

It was all a scavenger should have been able to accomplish.

"Tell it again," the Despoiled Queen commanded her, shifting in her throne of bone and ivy. Powerful legs, each themselves as tall as the servant, uncrossed and crossed again, right-above-left shifting to left-above-right. Her fingers drummed against her biceps loud enough to make a lesser woman's ears bleed. Restlessness was unbecoming of a huntress, to say nothing of a queen. It was a testament to the severity of the situation that Thalestris let her agitation show at all.

"Again," the servant sighed, bowing her head in acquiescence.

"Explain it to me in the simplest possible terms," the Tyrant of the Blind Maiden Cult said with quiet rage. "Like I'm twenty."

Her lowly crow explained.

§

When she first laid eyes on the Roman, she saw that he was nothing worth acknowledging. His pneuma was weak and fractured in its purpose. It was a subtle dissonance, but one she noticed right away. Standing among the late kyrios' favored initiates while the funeral drums boomed, he had appeared to her entirely out of his depth. She dismissed him readily from her mind.

Too readily, in the end.

She didn't see him again until the chaos had already set in and her blades were wet with the blood of crows from rival factions. They were in the shadows of Olympia's alleyways, in the darkness where crows crept and blind maidens hunted. One of the late kyrios' favored children had been captured by rival scavengers, and another had mistaken her for one of his captors. She had responded to his hostility with equal force, and battered him bloody.

Before she could complete her kill, the Roman came charging into her shadows with his paltry essence blazing. Like he could accomplish anything against her. She had seen that he was no one worth remembering. Even restraining herself as she was in the confines of the city, his strength was nothing compared to hers.

And then he dared to taunt her.

"You're not very good at this, are you? A real throat cutter is never seen unless they choose to be."

He was young and arrogant. He had yet to reap the rewards of his longevity, the perspective of centuries, and it was too late for him now. She drew hundreds of blades from the shadow of three, poison coating every single one, and flooded the shadowed alley with death. She returned him to the earth.

Rather, she tried.

"To Caesar you're assigned!"

Her oldest and first defiled dagger was nearly at his throat when the words fully registered in her mind. That was the moment she realized the Roman was a Roman. Recognition corroded her disdain, ate away at it and left it something darker.

She lashed murder at his throat, and only then did she see the lightning in his eyes.

"They say that in the legions."

The force that struck her from the sky was beyond anything a Sophic cultivator could ever hope to muster. And as she burned her heart's blood to right herself and retaliate, the dissonance she had observed in him earlier resolved itself in her mind. Not the product of a shoddy foundation as she had first disdainfully believed.

The product of a split foundation. He had climbed eleven steps up the divine mountain, but that was only the Greek portion of his soul. But the Roman portion-

It struck her down. Sent her spinning to the dirt.

"The meals are mighty fine," he informed her, and the outlandish nature of the statement had nearly distracted her from what it was. What he was doing. The Roman was calling a cadence.

The young man belted out lines like he expected a response, like he demanded one, and every one was punctuated by a flash of seething lightning in his eyes. If she wasn't a Heroine, she wouldn't have seen it at all. If she wasn't herself, she wouldn't have known what it meant. She felt her poison surging through his veins, felt the inferiority of his physique from the inside, and yet the Roman fought her like he had an army at his back. Like he couldn't possibly lose.

And with every line of his cadence, he grew stronger.

"They say that in the legions!" he roared, and kicked her like a wild dog.

The Roman struck her with strength far beyond his standing, stronger than anything a Sophic cultivator his age could possibly claim as his own virtue.

"The pay is fine it's great!"

Every blow was an insult. Every strike was a reminder.

"For every coin you gather!"

She hated him.

"The captain gathers eight!"

He tossed her through a stone wall like she was garbage, and she vowed within herself that she would kill him no matter what it took.

"You failed," Thalestris informed her daughter. The crow's lips twisted, but the Despoiled Queen waved her rage aside. "Continue."

§

I am pleased to inform you all that not only am I not dead, but the first chapter of Virtuous Sons has received a webcomic adaptation by the great and talented Hodge. You can find it here: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/virtuous-sons/list?title_no=797134

But tread lightly, cultivator. It's a banger.

June Schedule Announcement

Figured it would be a good idea to make this a separate post.

I mentioned it in the public forums, but here's the lowdown for you boys: I'm going to be spending the month of June and hopefully no longer than that filling out the backlog here and otherwise posting public chapters once a week as opposed to the usual three. 

I've been struggling with productivity recently, and while I've had my theories on the ultimate root cause, I'm beginning to suspect a large part of it is this looming specter of THE BACKLOG which I've been carrying with me since early 2021. This is a burden of my own making, of course, but that's life.

My hope is that I can hunker down and knock the rest of this arc out over the next few weeks, keep the chapters closer to the length they were in the Prologue Arc, and get back on track with the 3x weekly posting schedule from July onward. I'll keep you all posted if that changes, but for now that's the plan. Expect chapters to be uploaded here as they're written. 

As always, thank you boys for your continued support. It's a large part of what's keeping me on track with this writing thing, and that means the world to me.

Hope you enjoy today's chapter, and more to come soon. 'Til then.

1.113

The Young Griffon

Violence told a story.

The Young Aristocrat of the Raging Heaven Cult stepped into my octagon of swords and immediately moved to end the fight. He didn’t bother shedding his twice-bronzed silks - naturally, he didn’t need a naked fighter’s mobility to beat me. He didn’t wait for my word or the word of a third party to start the match - of course, I’d forfeited all courtesies when I treated him as my lesser. And most importantly, he didn’t present his wrists to be clapped in iron chains, as was the standard for Heroes playing in the pit - it went without saying that I wouldn’t be able to push him to the point that he’d draw upon his pneuma, even out of reflex.

The Hero struck first and with finality, making a statement through action alone that everyone in the pit could understand. It was a gesture I was more than happy to match, especially with regards to the chains.

Not for all the treasures of Heaven and Earth, not for a single frozen moment, would I ever be a willing slave again.

Alazon was from the brazen Coast, a city lauded in times of war for the valor of its fighting sons. He was a legendary Hero on top of that, grander than any mortal man could be. But that did not mean he was grand in all things. It should have. It should have meant that he was larger than life, glorious in every sense of the word, in every aspect of himself.

But here we were.

My fellow Young Aristocrat lunged straight for me with his right hand outstretched, faster than mortal eyes could track, and grasped nothing but the open air.

“Wrong!” I admonished him sharply, finishing my pivot right and laying a vicious kick into the side of his leading knee. The Hero’s breath hitched, caught just before he could call upon his pneuma, and his leg went out from under him without that bracing strength.

In an instant, the dull curiosity of the athletes in the pit was sharpened to a cutting edge. Alazon turned his fall forward into a graceful roll and came back to his feet as if we’d choreographed the exchange together, but his alacrity alone was not enough to change the truth of it. He’d tried to end this before it was begun and save himself the shameful hassle, but he’d failed.

Now his peers were moving from their spots. Gathering around in naked interest to see the spectacle unfold. To see the story told.

The upstart cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, while the Olympic athlete across from him slapped sand out of his silk robes.

“You’re not fast enough for that,” I informed him, and moved a bare moment before he did. Ducking low and to the right, I avoided the blur of a leaping roundhouse kick that would have shattered my skull and seized him by the back of his bronzed attire. I planted my feet and pulled him out of his trajectory. “You’re not fast enough to be fast alone!”

He thrashed free just before I could bury him, spinning sideways in the air and landing in a crouch just within the octagon’s northernmost boundary. His eyes were wide, his heart incredulous.

There came an appreciative whistle. Alazon twitched and glanced back at a lithe and ruggedly built man with umber flames in his eyes, leaning with both hands on the pommel of one of my boundary blades and watching us with naked interest. Our first Heroic spectator, though assuredly not our last.

Only then did Alazon accept my challenge in full. His eyes hardened, and in their cold light I saw more than just the promise of a broken ego. I saw my death, and the death of the humble orator as well.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t a story I had any interest in being told.

The Hero took two bounding steps across the octagon and into my reach, lashing out with a straight right jab and feinting a left hook when I leaned away from it. I stepped into it, caught it on my forearm and struck him once in his kidney. It was like striking a brick with my bare fist. He exhaled sharply, forced himself not to bring to bear his pneuma when he sucked a new breath in, and in that moment of conscious restraint I struck him twice again in the liver and then the gut.

Alazon lurched back to make space and I planted a foot on the trailing hem of his cult attire. It didn’t make him stumble, but the sound of ripping silk and the sight of his attire unraveling halfway from his frame may have been worse. A Heroine off to our right guffawed, and another three competitors traded amused grins as they crowded in around the octagon.

“The Fleet Foot, Alazon.”

I addressed him by his title carved in stone. I knew it not because I’d asked around, but because I’d memorized every name worth knowing on the cult’s stairway to heaven. I’d found him there on the twenty-second step.

“Young Aristocrat of the Brazen Aegis - or at least, Young Aristocrat of her humble colony faction here in Olympia. I’m curious. Who taught you how to fight?”

My opponent spat at my feet and rushed in with bright eyes blazing.

His next three blows were cautious, his footwork lighter as he moved. The jabs were weak enough because of it that I could catch them on my raised arms and only suffer the pain of future bruises. I raised my knee at the same time that he raised his and smiled through the lightning-white lance of pain when they collided. Alazon snarled a curse and hopped sideways, flexing the offended limb.

“This brazen inexperience.” Off to my left, a Hero in a golden loincloth groaned at the pun. “Tell me who’s to blame for it!”

“Enough of barking dogs!” The Fleet Foot Hero snapped.

He closed the gap again and again he was rebuffed. He swung each clenched fist with more punishing force than the mightiest unawoken man could produce with a hammer and two hands. His legs moved him faster than a mundane horse could run without any active pneuma to bolster him, nearly as fast as I could move with all the swiftness granted by my vital breath. And neither fact mattered, because he didn’t know how to fight.

Oh, he thought he did. And perhaps by the standards of the common man it was so. His form was clean enough, and a swift body with strength behind it made up for much in most situations. If this had been a fight at our fullest strengths I would have been at a ruinous disadvantage. Yet here in my octagon, what was any of it worth?

“A family from the Coast and a place of prominence in the Raging Heaven Cult. The question isn’t if you were taught, but by who,” I reasoned, striding around the perimeter of the octagon and accepting the jibes and nudges of the athletes gathering in to watch. Alazon’s eyes followed me calculatingly. “Who did you the disservice-?”

He exploded across the octagon just as I was passing Chilon. By the time the Obol Orator had begun to cry out a warning, I had already begun shifting my feet in the sand. I ducked his haymaker and lunged up into him, wrapping my arms in a bear hug around his torso and taking his momentum for myself. He kneed me frantically while he tried to escape the hold, but it was too late.

Spinning on my heel, I fell back and slammed him into the sand. The Hero’s breath exploded out of him. Our little crowd hollered and rained insults down upon the fallen aristocrat. In the distance, yet more Olympic athletes turned curiously our way.

I rolled sideways and away from Alazon while he gagged. Three times he’d kneed me while I was pulling him from the air to plant him in the earth, and three times he’d broken bone. Pacing again with my back straight, I ignored the urge to hunch over my battered ribs and instead filled the wheeling channels inside me with air. Not that I’d do anything with it. Not yet.

“Tell me who failed you,” I demanded. “Give me their name!”

“Stop talking!” Alazon seethed, pressing himself up with one arm. “Be silent forever! For even a moment!”

I refused.

“Who let you strut through this city with that fire in your eyes? Who led you to believe your heart flame made you something else, when it only ever made you more of what you are?”

We existed body and soul, each in three parts. From the earth was the first man’s body sculpted, and from the heavens came his soul. We cultivated reason, spirit, and hunger with both halves in mind. Though we were children of the earth, we refined our heavenly souls every day in the hopes that one day they would match the starry skies above. Though we were reaching ever for the heights, we remembered our earthly bodies and tempered them in the pursuit of an aesthetic matched only by masterwork marble.

Alazon was faster than me, that was evident to anyone with eyes, but it was a runner’s speed. He’d beat me in a sprint every time he chose to run it, but that meant little enough in the octagon. This wasn’t a race of that kind. He could race around the pit as long as he desired, but he had to come to me eventually.

The Fleet Foot moved and put that thought to practice, rushing in low at a speed I’d have been hard-pressed to react to if I hadn’t read his intent a moment before he did it. His eyes had lingered too long on his target, and the shifting of his hips had betrayed him. He only rose halfway to his feet before exploding forward into that low sprint, but how could it surprise me when his body had already warned me he’d do it?

I pivoted and brought my right leg up, avoiding his knifing jab and hammering my knee into his chin. He staggered past me, assaulted by the siren song of his peers’ disdain.

Diving after him, I put my shoulder into the small of his back and took him to the ground. Pushing him off balance felt like pressing a tree out from its roots. It felt like toppling a marble arch. But when we hit the sands, the weight of his body kicked up no more sand than mine.

“Who failed you?” I whispered in the Hero’s ear, riding him like an unruly horse while he thrashed and bucked. “Who let you walk out from under their wing in ignorance? Who sent you here to languish in the shadows of greater men?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Alazon hissed, and it was a genuine question as much as it was an insult. He threw his head back, searching for my nose with the crown of his head. I had already drawn back, kicked my legs out to the side and dug my toes into the sand while I wrenched my arm around his neck.

The Hero’s next words were choked, but audible: “I’m a hero. Men tell stories about me. I have the adoration of the Muses-”

“Had,” I interjected, and leaned back. Alazon’s face darkened as my choke hold tightened well beyond the point where a mortal man would have fainted. “You had their adoration. You were a soul worth speaking of. But you erred somewhere along the way from that moment to this one - you lost your golden glory. Tell me something, Alazon. When was the last time the Muses spoke to you?”

“Fuck you,” he snarled, slamming clenched fists into my sides and clawing at my skin when that didn’t put me off him. “Fuck you, scavenger!”

“Who condemned you to the Fates? Who brought you here and made you less?”

He twisted and flopped around in the sand like a fish, for all the good it did him.

Body and soul. Heaven and earth. In a righteous world, those scales would be balanced. In a just world, Alazon would be my better in all things - in all three portions of his tripartite soul, and in every martial prowess. But he wasn’t. He was wildly far beyond me in the fields in which he specialized, but that is all he was.

The golden age heroes I’d grown up on stories of were larger than life, grand in all ways. Even the least martially inclined were terrors in a fight. Even the Augur, gentle Orpheus, had been a towering presence the night I met him in his tomb. He was a man of the lyre, a man of poetry and heartfelt song, and there hadn’t been a single doubt in my mind when we spoke that he could tear any man apart with his bare hands if he so chose.

Orpheus was a gentle man, yes, but capable of unspeakable violence.

That’s what a hero was meant to be.

Twisting and rolling in the center of the pit amidst a crowd of rowdy men and women further along the path to heaven than the average soul could ever dream of being, I found myself locking eyes with the solitary Philosopher among their number. I remembered the story he’d given me as a gift, more valuable than any precious weapons or relics.

I remembered how it had ended. In glory.

In gold.

“This is Justice,” spoke Calliope the Muse. The Goddess with the Heavenly Voice cradled Damon Aetos’ jaw in her ethereal hand and laid her golden crown upon his head. “Remember his face.”

“Glory begets a crown,” I told the Hero Alazon. “Not the reverse. It isn’t the laurel leaf that makes you a champion. It’s everything else!”

“You don’t know anything,” he forced out through grit teeth. The fires behind his eyes flickered ominously. “Junior Philosopher sitting smug inside your well, lecturing your betters when they appear above your head. When they step into your little ring to humor you! I’ve overcome trials you couldn’t imagine. I’ve done it twice. I’m a Hero. What are you, to me?”

What other answer could there be?

“I’m free.”

The Young Aristocrat snapped. I released my choke and flung myself away as malice exploded from his soul. The flames behind his eyes surged, his Heroic pneuma rose, and he turned on me with murder pounding in his heart.

He took one step toward me and was struck down by a flash of tanned skin and a golden loincloth. Another Hero’s vibrant pneuma rose as Alazon struggled against one of the men that had been spectating our fight, and any question as to the outcome was quickly put to rest as the struggle was joined by two more against the Young Aristocrat. I supposed that even these sorry souls had a sense of sportsmanship at the end of the day. I snorted and withdrew my tribulation blades back into my shadow, while the rest of the crowd wandered off and returned to their training.

“Apologies, senior brother,” I said, turning back to Chilon. “Where were we-?”

I blinked.

Had I missed them in the crowd, or had they only arrived as the fight was ending?

Standing outside the now invisible boundary of my octagon, Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris regarded me as if for the first time. I stood up straight and offered them each a smile, setting aside the pain of my broken ribs and battered flesh.

“Hello, friends,” I greeted the three of them happily. “What brings you in to my domain?”