sunslammers

1.112

The Young Griffon

Half a year had come and gone since the day I stood alone in the center of the Scarlet Stadium and accepted every laurel crown the Daylight Games could offer me. Standing tall and proud, as unfulfilled as I was triumphant, I had understood something crucial about the nature of my father’s city and its people - of Alikos entire.

They were all slaves. Every single one of them. And so was I.

This city was the chain.

That conscious acknowledgement had spurred my soul beyond its limits, forcing through the bottleneck in my refinement and carrying me forward from the ninth rank of the Civic Realm to the tenth. At the time, it had felt like opening my eyes. In the months that followed those games I had looked upon the Scarlet City, her citizens and her metics, her freedmen and her slaves, and I had seen for myself the manacles that bound their wrists. Not the iron manacles that Sol had worn with his weary resignation, but manacles of cruel scarlet thread.

No matter his standing, every man in the Scarlet City wore those strings of blood around his wrist. And at the other end of each of those scarlet strings was the same clenched fist. My father’s fist.

At some point between the events of Chilon’s tale and my earliest waking memory, Damon Aetos had claimed his island in the sun. The Scarlet City was his, and every man within it was his slave.

In my naivety, I had decided that that was a trait unique to him - that all the world outside of his domain would be glorious and true. And so when my cousin returned home more vibrant than he’d left, I’d taken that as my cosmic confirmation and taken the only opportunity available to me at his wedding - the one and only night of the year that my father would be preoccupied by the fallen sun god’s wonder and I would not. I had escaped, escaped, with Sol at my side, and in that moment I had believed from the bottom of my virtuous heart that freedom was waiting for me just beyond that rosy dawn in the greater mediterranean.

I’d been mistaken. In my euphoria, I had erred. Boarding the Eos and setting her sails for Olympia, I had allowed myself to believe that my father was a uniquely overbearing existence. That the world I’d been born into was still golden-bright, in a distant place that I could travel to.

I was wrong. Olympia and its Raging Heaven Cult taught me that. Thracia’s Orphic mystery drove the point home. Every man in the Scarlet City was a slave to the Tyrant Damon Aetos, but that wasn’t unique. It wasn’t because it was the Scarlet City. It wasn’t because it was Damon Aetos.

Every man was a slave to a Tyrant in their domain. There were no kings and queens of glory left remaining in this world - the distance that separated me from that golden place could not be measured in stades or miles. It could only be measured in years. In centuries and millennia. I had missed it.

I had missed all of it.

This world was iron, now. Its gods were dead and gone, its kings and queens were tyrants. And its heroes? Its burning souls, its champions of glory?

They were little more than sparks. As envious of the world’s greater imposition as they were defiant of it. As likely to covet a Tyrant’s yoke as they were to resent it.

As likely to punch down as they were to punch up.

“Junior, it’s time to go.”

Half a year had come and gone since the Daylight Games, and the wheel kept turning after that. The month of mandatory training that preceded the Olympic Games was almost upon us, and the closer we drew to it the more competitors came. First a trickle, then a stream, and now a rushing flood of Heroic cultivators from all over the known world.

It wasn’t the case that every Heroic cultivator in existence would be competing in the Olympic Games, but it felt almost like it as the days passed. Every day saw the arrival of a fresh face in the Olympic Stadium, a new pair of burning eyes and a passionately blazing heart there to size up the competition. As spring secured its grip on the city of Olympia, that fresh face turned into fresh faces, a handful every day. Then dozens.

As these mighty cultivators sought an empty patch of sand in the Olympic pit to call their own, a place to practice for the Games that would define the rest of their lives in just a few short weeks, it was only natural that their juniors would make room for them. As such, every Hero that arrived at the pit was another Philosopher gently pressed out.

It only made sense, after all - while the stadium was technically open to the Raging Heaven’s favored initiates all the up to the lighting of the Olympic Flame, what junior would be so rude as to deny an actual competitor the space they needed to hone their bodies? Never mind the fact that the Games were a test of martial cultivation, of pure bodily refinement. What did it matter that a Heroic sprinter needed no more room to run his laps than any other man? It was the principle of the thing. A matter of respect.

“Junior!” Chilon hissed, reaching out despite his misgivings and grabbing my arm. Sorea, perched on that same arm while I read his delivered missive, snapped his beak in warning and spread wide his wings. The Obol Orator grimaced but held my arm tight. “It’s been a bad idea for days and I let you talk me into it regardless, but the time for games has passed.”

“The time for games is yet to come,” I told him without looking up from the letter.

Though I couldn’t see his face, I felt his frustration and his fear in the beating of his heart. To my senior’s credit, the Heroic heart sense that Orpheus had awoken in me was the only sense that betrayed Chilon’s true panic. His pneuma did not rise, and his sophic influence was only an insistent current against my own. If not for my time in Thracia, I wouldn’t have had any indication that at this moment Chilon thought he was going to die.

The more Heroic cultivators that came to stake their claim in the Olympic Stadium’s grand sand pit, the more Sophic cultivators gave up their spots in deference to them. Soon the Sophic majority had leveled out into an equal proportion, and then in a cascade of Heroic arrivals and Sophic departures given way entirely to a Heroic majority. The more Philosophers that fled, the greater the scrutiny those that remained were made to suffer through. The apathetic tolerance I’d first observed gave way to expectant glances as the days passed. That expectation soon turned to irritation. The glances turned to glares.

Chilon and I had been the last two Philosophers remaining in the pit for nearly a week now. Chilon hadn’t liked it, but he’d liked the idea of leaving me to my own devices even less. Thankfully, secluded as we were in our humble patch of shadowed sand near the stadium’s western entrance, that Heroic irritation had remained largely passive. It was an enormous stadium, and there was still plenty of room for every competitor in the city despite the way they postured.

But all good things inevitably ended. In this case, it was a Hero who I had met once before that was ending them. A familiar face from a rowdy drinking club, one of the Raging Heaven Cult’s own Young Aristocrats, had just been forced out of his place in the pit. The aggressor was a larger competitor who I could only assume was his senior in refinement. Now the displaced Hero was headed our way, a fire in his eyes and murder in his heart.

“Griffon,” Chilon spoke firmly. “We have to go right now. Trust me in this.”

Even now, as the terror built in the frantic beating of his heart, he restrained himself and scolded me like a mentor scolded an errant student. He was trying to save me without terrifying me. Attempting to guide me out of harm without bringing the harm to my attention, worried that I’d panic and trip headfirst into it if I knew that it was there. Protecting me as my senior from the consequences of my own bravado.

“I’m not leaving,” I told him, reading Sol’s letter intently. On my arm, Sorea shrieked a warning cry into the Obol Orator’s face. He flinched, and a portion of his panic seeped through the cracks in his composure.

“Listen to me, now! This isn’t our place! We have to leave while we still can, while he’s affording us the time-!”

“Greetings, Philosophers,” the Hero Alazon insulted us, his pleasant voice a stark contrast to the ugly rage inside his heart. “You’ve taken my spot.”

I felt a powerful sense of déjà vu.

“I don’t see your name on it,” I said, the same as I had the morning after Bakkhos’ funeral, in a drinking club owned by the Hero’s own family. At that time, there had been three Heroic cultivators at my back and three more on their way. Now I alone remained, with only a Philosopher of the eight rank to speak on my behalf.

And to the old man’s credit, Chilon did speak.

“Excuse these lowly sophists,” the Obol Orator said, mastering himself at once and masking his fear to all but a Hero’s heart sense. It wasn’t enough, but it was an admirable effort. He gripped my arm and raised it up demonstrably. “This one’s intentions are good, but I fear he’s spent too much time out here in pursuit of refinement - the sun has addled his senses, you see. If it pleases the Hero, I’ll escort him out-”

“It does not please me,” Alazon said flatly. “You may go, sophist. But I have business with this one.”

I was surprised. An offer to take his life and run - it was more grace than I would have expected from the spiteful Young Aristocrat.

I was surprised again when Chilon refused to take it.

“Honored Hero, please - he’s hardly more than a boy. We were all young and foolish at one point, weren’t we? Of course some grow out of their inadequacies sooner than others, but isn’t that why old men like us exist? To guide our juniors down the path that every man once walked alone? Is that not a wise man’s virtue?”

“A withered old man’s virtue, perhaps.” Alazon dismissed him, and I heard the Hero advance another step through the sands. His rage was beating harder against my ribs with every moment that I refused to look up from my letter. “But I am not old like you are old. There is no we. If you claim to be a wise man, you should understand the difference between us.”

“I implore the great Hero, turn your eyes from our differences and towards the traits that we share as sons of Raging Heaven-!”

“One more word!” Alazon snarled, his pneuma rising and lashing out like a snake, the sudden crashing wave of his influence nearly throwing Chilon off his feet. “One more word, you wretched failure, and you’ll wish that immortal storm crown had never spit you back out. One more word and I’ll send you back to your worthless village in a thousand wizened pieces! Begone.”

Chilon didn’t say another word, but neither did he move. He stood between us while terror and shame hammered at the seams of his composure, knowing he was going to die and standing his ground regardless.

“What is the champion’s virtue?” I mused. There was a moment of silence. Distantly, beyond our humble patch of sand, I felt the myriad streams of curious influence shift away from Alazon and Chilon, converging onto me. It was hardly the first time there had been a confrontation in the pit, but it was surely the only time that the argument had taken place between a Hero and a Philosopher.

These Heroic souls had come from all walks of life, from every corner of the free mediterranean, bearing the proof of their standing in each of their burning eyes. No one Hero was the same as any other. Each of them was unique. Each of them was glorious. Each one a slayer of monsters, a liberator of men.

And somehow, here and now, each and every Heroic cultivator paying attention to our little spat was content to let it run its course.

“Speak up, junior,” Alazon demanded, though I knew he’d heard me clear as day.

“What is the champion’s virtue?” I asked him again. Sol’s letter was written as succinctly as could be, but that didn’t make its contents any easier to come to terms with. I read it again. It hardly made a difference. “You’re a champion, aren’t you? You’re here to compete.”

“No. I’m here to win a crown.”

“It’s the crown that matters,” I murmured, reading the letter again. Not the competition. Not the struggle. “Victory alone is a champion’s virtue?”

“How did you make it to the Sophic Realm at all? Idiot colonial, it’s right there in the name. A champion stands above.”

The crown was only worth the effort it took to seize it. I’d learned that lesson in the Daylight Games. How was it that I understood that and not him? How could a lowly citizen know in the fullness of their soul what a legendary hero had yet to grasp?

This world is iron now, Zegreuas had declared in my vision of his madness. I was beginning to see what he’d meant.

In a golden-bright world, in a righteous world, it wouldn’t be this way. That a Tyrant could exist at all was a sign that we had been diminished. That a Hero forced from his place by a greater imposition would choose to turn away and force his will upon his juniors, to punch down instead of up, was evidence that this place was lesser.

I read Sol’s message one final time.

That a Philosopher could lie as easily as he breathed was proof this world was iron.

My heart flickered in my chest, and I burnt the papyrus to ash.

“Let’s exchange discourse,” I decided, looking up from the ashes and rising to my feet.

“Griffon!” Chilon snapped, wheeling around on me in a wide-eyed panic.

Sorea took flight, the virtuous beast tracked by the hungry eyes of more than a few Heroic cultivators. A virtuous beast was valuable in many ways, though consuming it was the least interesting of them all by far. I considered the shadowed sands around me, humming thoughtfully, and then reached into my shadow with formless pankration hands.

Alazon’s eyes flared. “I thought you’d never ask-”

He stopped short, blinking at eight pankration hands as they pulled eight stone blades from my shadow and drove each of them into the sand. Spaced equally apart, they formed an octagon of a size you might find in any mystery cult’s gymnasium. Chilon choked, his eyes flying open wide.

“That’s-!”

The blade that Chilon had cut himself upon during his initiation rites, the blade once buried in the tribulation statue of the Twice-Killed Tyrant Sisyphus, jutted proudly up from the sand along with its stolen sibling swords.

“What is this?” Alazon asked me warily. His eyes flickered left, then right. He was as conscious of our growing audience as I was. And though he didn’t know it yet, he’d made a crucial mistake.

“Every Hero’s spirit is a pittance to the Flame,” I said, stepping into the octagon that separated us. “A Hero’s standing is their key to admittance in the Games, but it’s their body alone that wins them glory. There are ten events a man can win. Tell me, Alazon, which crowns do you covet?”

The Hero glared at me, but he didn’t step through the boundary of my swords. Not yet.

“Long jump and the sprint,” he said at length. I smiled.

“Then I’ll offer you a third. As your senior in-”

“You are not my senior in anything-!”

I struck him with a memory of my lived experience, a drop of Orphic madness, and he leaned back as if I’d slapped him.

“As your senior in pankration, I’ll offer you a chance at a third crown,” I said magnanimously, and pulled off one of the two laurel leaf crowns I kept wrapped around my biceps. I held it up for all the stadium to see, and then I cast it down into the center of the arena I’d outlined with swords. “Step into my domain and face me as you would an opponent in the Games - with martial excellence, with your body’s refinement alone. Match your violence against mine and prove that you deserve this lowly sophist’s place in the pit, or get out of my sight.”

I couldn’t have ignored the black rage in his heart if I’d tried. “You think I’m afraid of your master?” he demanded of me, the flames behind his eyes flaring. “You think the Raven will protect you here? He won’t. And neither will that worthless gossiping bumpkin!” The Hero jabbed a finger at Chilon, hovering just outside the perimeter of swords opposite him. The Obal Orator clenched his fists. “The audacity of it - to set terms, to make demands of me like I’m the outsider. A lion’s time is better spent!”

I could have responded with any number of insults and jeers, could have driven him that final half-step over the edge in front of all of his peers and ruined his name. But that would be a disservice to my senior brother Chilon. Goading him into a rage, forcing the other competitors in the sand pit to step in to preserve the sanctity of their space, that would have been the safest of my options. But it would have been far too long winded. Far too crude.

My response was simple, yet profound. I delivered it to him with the voice of my soul.

“Attend.”

Alazon’s critical mistake had been assuming that I was a coward just like him.

His ego left him only one choice. The Hero Alazon stepped into my octagon.

1.111

The Son of Rome

The day that we boarded the Eos and set sail for distant Thracia, Griffon and I had been of one mind. It was the Gadfly’s intent to keep us busy - to keep us safe from ourselves and the higher powers we had provoked with our unkind marauding. Mostly, it was to get us out of his sight. Griffon and I had understood that, and we had afforded that sentiment about as much respect as it deserved.

We’ll do it all at once. That had been our silent agreement, spoken through the ravens in our shadows. At first I’d disagreed with him, but the return of the Eos and her irreverent sea dogs had convinced me. Leveraging the experiences of our ship’s worldly crew, as well as our Heroic companions’ connections, we would travel the Free Mediterranean and the greater boundaries beyond as outlined in the Gadfly’s map. We’d walk in-step the same path that Bakkhos had walked before us, and we would discover as he had discovered the reagents to divine sustenance.

That had been the plan. And then, on our very first stop, we had been afforded a glimpse at the Tyrant Riot’s true nature - the company that he had kept, the foundation that he had established, and the virtue at his core. Griffon and I, and to an indirect degree Selene and Scythas, had each drank from the Mad Tyrant’s cup and suffered a portion of his mania.

We had been humbled, each in our own ways. The decision to turn back to Olympia after all had been grudgingly made, but there was too much we didn’t know. There were too many mysteries to solve them all in a bare handful of weeks, and Griffon was still as adamant as he’d ever been about being in the Half-Step City when the Olympic Games began.

So we had returned.

And the Gadfly had betrayed us.

Now here I stood, trapped beneath the immortal storm crown that hung over Kaukoso Mons. Entangled by the infernal web of the Raging Heaven Cult’s politics. An unwitting, unqualified participant in a great city’s conflict of succession.

Again.

Stranded though I was beneath the storm, I wasn’t entirely deafened. As surely as the breeze, Sorea carried the words I couldn’t say to the cultivators that needed to hear them and delivered each of their responses faithfully back to me.

Solus,

The road to Lacedaemon is long and treacherous with Spartans - I’ve never seen so many Infernal sons in my life, and I think I was a happier person for it. This morning alone I’ve seen three separate exchanges of “discourse” between scholars of this rusted mystery faith, and two of the three ended in death. The third would have as well, had I not stepped in to save the losing party’s life.

Would you believe that the miserable wretch had the audacity to spit on my silks and accuse me of obstructing his refinement? These dogs would rather die than be humbled even one single time. I swear to you, it took every drop of temperance within me not to stomp his fool head through the earth. These roads are bad enough, though, and he’d already been mauled so savagely that a kiss on the cheek might have killed him - let alone a kiss from my boot.

Anyway. Your eagle is giving me an ugly look, so I’ll get to the point.

I’ve searched these mountains and their valleys and paced up and down the city’s coasts. I’ve learned just shy of nothing and found even less. There are an endless number of merchants ready and willing to sell me wine along with its various reagents, and a disappointing proportion of them are just as willing to lie to my face and claim that they have the key to nectar itself hidden in their moth-bitten bags. But there are vanishingly few who actually knew of Bakkhos and his exploits here, and none at all who knew him personally as far as I’ve found.

I’m sorry, Solus. If it was Naxos I’d have found the damned reagent already. Maybe… if you sent Scythas south my way, along with Sorea, I could guide him through the Isles. Even if I can’t be on the ship myself-

At any rate, I’m just outside of Krokos now. I’ll wait here until the eagle comes back.

Might do some hunting in the meantime. I haven’t found any thousand year old grapes, but there are more virtuous beasts skulking around these roads than there are men with sense. Just yesterday a traveling metic swore to me on his father’s ashes that he’d seen a feral stallion break a brown bear’s back and eat its beating heart. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t interested in seeing a creature like that with my own two eyes.

Hope all is well on your end. Take care.

Jason

I skimmed it once, quickly, and then combed through the missive line-by-line a second time while Sorea tucked his head under his wings in the darkness of my cave dwelling and went to sleep. He deserved it, with the miles I was putting him through.

After my fourth pass through Jason’s letter, I sighed and stood.

The cave that Socrates called his own was only a stone’s throw away from the dwelling I’d claimed in Lefteris’ absence. Close enough to see the whites of his eyes if he was standing at the mouth of his cave and I at mine. In any other case but this one, I would have struggled to believe that the Heroic archer could have lived this close to another cultivator for so many months without having even the faintest inkling of his presence. But the Gadfly had mentored the Broad, who had in turn mentored Aristotle - and I had more than enough experience with my old master’s anonymous wanderings to know that it was all too easy to overlook a real philosopher when they had no intention of being known.

Trodding heavily up the mountain path to the Gadfly’s hidden cavern home, I considered my options once again. Each letter returned by the Heroic souls Griffon and I had entangled ourselves with had been another option crossed off my list. Each letter returned was another dead end, every journey a marker on the map wasted.

With Scythas and Bakhur, we had been able to find our mark even in the vast borderless lands of savage Thracia. It had been my hope that given a bit more time to make up for the lack of extra hands, Jason and Anastasia could have managed the same success in the other parts of the free Mediterranean that the Gadfly intended to banish us to. It had been a naive hope, but I had hoped for it nonetheless. And when two of Griffon’s three had returned my letters with their reluctant support etched into the papyrus, that hope had doubled and redoubled again.

But a passing familiarity with the late kyrios could only take them so far. Each of our Heroic companions had known Bakkhos just as well as Scythas, all of them in their own ways, but unlike Scythas they hadn’t had any idea what they were looking for. They’d traveled far and wide, burned days and weeks they’d all have rather spent training for the Games, and they’d found nothing for it in the end.

There were four golden markers on the central landmass of the free Mediterranean, and so I had sent four Heroic cultivators to scour them for the components of divine nectar.

Jason had gone to the marker furthest south - the free-city of Krokos in the land of Lacedaemon, home to the Infernal Frenzy Cult. He had found nothing there but a cult full of restless soldiers with no one but themselves to cut their teeth on, and a countryside crawling with virtuous beasts.

Elissa had gone east over mountains Boeon to the closest marker relative to Olympia, the city-state of Levanta. A fruitless trip. Kyno had ventured further south and close to home, combing through the city of Paleta just north of The Coast. A wasted endeavor. And finally, Anastasia had gone north along the western coast as far as one could go without crossing into Macedonian soil, traversing the uninhabited breakers in search of that vaguely labeled Aornum. And what had she found?

Nothing. All of them, nothing.

Because of who?

“You,” I spoke, and the word rebounded with heat off the cavern walls.

The man known as the Scholar exhaled slowly and opened one eye, staring at me upside down like a bat. Balancing on the bald portion of his skull with his legs crossed above him like he were sitting on air, he looked about as ridiculous as an old man could look. But he was as heavily muscled as he’d ever been, and he was mended enough from his encounter with Polyzalus that he’d been able to remove his linen bandages without bleeding out on the cave floor.

“The boy speaks.” Socrates snorted and rolled forward, smoothly coming to his feet and brushing the dust from his head. “After three weeks and a meeting with nearly every dangerous authority on this mountain, the raven finally graces my humble estate with his presence. Can I offer you a drink? A glass of wine, perhaps?”

“I brought my own,” I snapped, and pulled a golden cup of spirit wine from the shadows of the raven mantle I wore over my left shoulder like a cloak.

I watched the Gadfly’s eyes trace over the cup, watched the shock set in as the fingers of his influence brushed over the cup and its contents and recognized it for what it was. Then, in disgust, I threw it to the cavern floor.

The old philosopher moved with speed and grace at odds with his old and muscled frame, crossing the distance between us in a split second and stooping low to catch the cup just a bare moment after it left my hand. He spun around and up, following the arc of wine as it flew from the cup and collecting it back into its golden bowl before a single drop could hit the stone.

Socrates looked at me in disbelief. “Is this-?”

He paused and took a deep breath of it, inhaling an aroma that I still couldn’t properly describe a month after my meeting with the faceless presence at the center of the Orphic faith’s initiation rites. He looked at me like I’d grown two more heads.

“You found it?” he demanded. “All these weeks you’ve had it, and you haven’t told me?”

He was right to be irritated with me. He was right to be outraged, even. Following my meeting with Aleuas, I’d been so furious with the Gadfly that I hadn’t even wanted to see his face. I’d kept the golden cup of wine hidden in my shadow out of spite and spite alone, because in showing me he had no trust in my judgment he had made it clear that I couldn’t afford to put all of my trust in his.

I had kept it to myself because a part of me had still held out hope that we could do this ourselves. I had held on stubbornly to that hope, refined my body day and night and broken bread with the various feuding factions within the Raging Heaven Cult, all the while waiting for just a single letter to come back as a success.

It had been in vain.

So here I was, in the Gadfly’s cave. Appealing once again to a higher power.

Reaching into my shadow cloak a second time, I pulled Socrates’ map out and crumpled it into a ball in my fist. He watched me silently as I tossed it down between us and spat on it.

“‘Go here and find me a golden cup filled with spirit wine,’” I echoed his words from a month before, the orders he gave us the day he banished Griffon and I from the Half-Step City. “‘Return it to me without spilling a drop. I, your grandfather, will handle the rest.’”

“You were listening after all,” Socrates said, his irritation rising along with his pneuma. “Tell me, then, boy. Why did you wait three weeks to give me this? Why waste the time?”

We had failed to find a single other ingredient we were confident enough in to risk ruining the wine we had with incorrect reagents. We had been too naive, hadn’t given ourselves enough time to see it through. Each of our Heroic companions had known Bakkhos, but none of them had known him like the Gadfly had known him. Jason’s letter, the last of the bad news carried by Sorea back to me, had been the point proven.

I couldn’t justify abandoning this quest in full, no matter how much I wanted to. Not when Selene hadn’t emerged from the Rein-Holder’s sunset domain even once since our return. Not when her mother still lay comatose.

Not when I could see it through.

“All that a liar gains by falsehood is suspicion when they tell the truth.” It was another quote. This time, a quote from my true mentor - Aristotle. One of the lessons he’d hammered into my skull as a boy, though with mixed results.

Socrates scowled. “Make your point.”

I drew the raven’s midnight veil up from my face and met his glare with mine.

“You call us fools at every opportunity and handle us accordingly,” I said flatly. “You build a maze around us with nectar at the end of it, because you don’t trust us to do the right thing unless a higher hand has guided us to it. And you wonder why, when I return with a treasure you didn’t actually believe I’d be able to find, I don’t immediately offer it up to you?

“You treat us like children - you treat me like a child. When I was ten years younger and far more deserving of it, Aristotle never treated me that way - he was wise enough to know that if he did, I’d treat him like a minder more than a mentor worthy of my confidence.”

I sat down heavily, the weight of thirty men pressing ceaselessly down. Looking up at the Gadfly, I spread my hands in supplication.

“You’ve made it clear I’m no student of yours,” I said, lifting my lip. “Nothing to you, and no one at all but a nuisance to be led away from trouble. Fine. But just this once - one time, here and now if never again, spare me the noble lies and tell me the truth.”

With every word I spoke, the Gadfly’s expression grew colder and harder. Like stone.

His voice was like a falling blade. “Ask a proper question if you want to hear the truth.”

I obliged him.

“You gave us a map with ten markers on it yet only one ingredient to find. You didn’t withhold the other nine from us because you were unsure of what they were - if your ‘conjecture’ was really that weak, you wouldn’t have given Selene that false hope to begin with. You knew what we’d need, and you knew where we’d have to go to find it.”

The Gadfly waited silently for the full thrust of my question.

I folded a single finger of my supplicating hands.

“We’ve given you one of ten. Of the nine ingredients remaining for the synthesis of divine nectar, how many are stowed away in your folded logic cloth?”

No one believed a liar, even when they told the truth. I wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said. He’d broken that trust. So he answered me with action instead of words. The Gadfly reached into a fold within his filthy rags and twisted it, pulled as if it was a bag he was turning inside out-

And poured a river of precious metals, vibrant herbs, and coal-black salt onto the cave floor.

With slow deliberation, Socrates placed the golden cup of wine down in the center of the pile.

“Ten.”

1.110 [Myron]

The Little Kyrios

He had done his best.

It was a cold comfort, he knew, but it was what he clung to in the end. In the business of cultivation the results were all that mattered - the tribulations were hardly worth mentioning, so long as they were overcome. Hubris unending was permitted, so long as one advanced forward in the end. And in that same vein, no amount of well-meaning virtue would make a difference in a man’s final judgment if he succumbed to the unforgiving defamation of a bottleneck.

Yet even so. Myron had done everything he could. Was it really his fault that he’d failed in the end?

Well, yes. Obviously.

“Niko!” he called out to his eldest cousin, one morning and every morning, the same routine every day. Spotting a space on the side of the bench not occupied by his cousin’s wife, Myron squeezed in beside the Hero and looked up at him expectantly.

“Yes, cousin?” Niko ruffled his hair, today and every day just a bit faster than Myron’s attempt to dodge his reaching hand.

“When are we leaving?” he asked. Today, and yesterday, and the day before that.

And today, as he had every day before, Myron’s eldest cousin winced and turned his burning gaze to the distant clay-shingles of their family’s estate.

“Not today. But soon.”

“You said that yesterday,” Myron pointed out. At this point, he was too familiar with the feeling to let his disappointment show. Niko sighed and nodded, returning his attention to his meal.

“That I did.”

It had been months since Lio and Sol ran away from the Rosy Dawn, across the Ionian Sea to Olympia. Every day that passed was another day’s travel put between them. Though Niko insisted that they’d find them soon enough once they set sail, Myron was beginning to wonder. And more and more, he was beginning to feel something he’d never expected to feel in regards to his eldest cousin.

Doubt.

“We’ll train later, alright?” Niko said around a mouthful of salted sea bass, nudging Myron with his elbow. “You just focus on your own refinement for now - if you keep progressing the way you have been, you’ll be handing Griffon his hide all on your own when the time comes.”

They both knew that wasn’t true. Or rather, they should have both known. For some reason, the version of Lio that existed within their eldest cousin’s mind was entirely different from the true Young Aristocrat that had beaten Myron, his older brother, and each of his cousins sans Niko like unruly dogs for daring to stand between him and his wanderlust. Had the five years between Niko leaving and returning to the Rosy Dawn really been all it had taken to change Lio so severely? Had he not always been himself?

Myron didn’t know. He’d been too young in the days before Niko left to remember more than a handful of vivid moments. But in his gut, his deepest instinct, Myron suspected that Lio hadn’t changed. He’d only revealed more of his true self with time. That was what cultivation was, wasn’t it?

But saying these things wouldn’t make them true in Niko’s eyes. If it were that simple, Lydia would have convinced him weeks ago. So rather than make another scene, Myron just nodded and reached for a plate of bread and goat cheese.

“Okay.”

He’d tried.

S

“Myron?” Heron eyed him strangely, halfway through the marble entry to the room they’d shared for as long as Myron could remember. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” he replied archly. “I’m cultivating.”

Admittedly, his methods might have appeared a little strange from the outside looking in. But Niko had told him that the Hunting Bird’s Breath was a technique that required precise control in every situation, under every duress. The more oddities he exposed himself to, the better able he would be to maintain the pneumatic chambers within his body when he truly needed them. To that end, he’d experimented with as many odd environments and scenarios as he could think of.

At the moment, that involved hanging upside down from their shared room’s ceiling while a brazier burned merrily underneath him. Myron inhaled deeply, with water eyes and a heavy head, all the while carefully cradling both of the pneumatic chambers within his body even as he coughed on the smoke rising up from the brazier.

“Another one of Niko’s lessons?” his older brother asked, a faint undercurrent of discontent beneath his exasperation. Heron shook his head and walked on by, shedding his cult attire as he went and collapsing face-first onto his bed. “They get more ridiculous every time. What’s this one meant to teach you?”

“Control,” Myron coughed.

“Control,” Heron muttered into his pillow. “Right.”

They lapsed into a silence that was just a bit too heavy to be comfortable. Ever since Lio had left - no, before that. Ever since Myron had broken through his bottleneck and advanced past his older brother, there had been a tension between the two of them. It wasn’t anything Heron had put into words, and so Myron hadn’t either, but it was there. And it was only getting worse with time.

It had gotten worse when Lio left. Heron had been nearly as happy to see him go as their parents, and that made Lydia furious. She ignored him outright, now, and while the rest of their cousins remained cordial with him, the line had been drawn. On one side stood Heron and Castor, at odds with Lio for as long as Myron could remember, and on the other side stood Myron and Lydia. For now it was only a theoretical divide, but that was because Heron and Castor still didn’t know what they had planned.

And because they didn’t know what Niko intended to do, it made his disproportionate focus on Myron and Lydia since coming home all the more galling to Myron’s older brother.

“Alright, fine!” Heron abruptly snapped to no one in particular, shoving himself up out of bed. Had he taken Myron’s silence for something else? It wouldn’t have been the first time. “What are we controlling?”

“We?”

Heron waved impatiently at the full picture of Myron’s admittedly odd meditation training. “If I have to share a room with you and suffer this nonsense, the least you can do is clue me in on the lesson. We’re brothers, aren’t we?”

Myron bit down on the first response that came to his mind. When was the last time Stavros Aetos’ sons had gotten along? When was the last time they’d treated each other like brothers - like Lio treated Sol, and Sol treated Lio?

Myron heaved a weary sigh - and promptly choked on smoke and coughed so hard he fell from the ceiling and into the lit brazier.

“Son of a bitch!” Heron snarled, and the world spun as Myron was dragged roughly from the searing hot iron basin and thrown onto his bed. “Are you out of your mind!? Control, my ass-”

“It’s called the Hunting Bird’s Breath,” Myron croaked while Heron rushed across the room to retrieve a clay jug of clear water to douse him with. The water was a pleasant shock, soothing and bright blue-cold.

“The what?” Heron snapped, still a bit wild-eyed.

“It’s a breathing technique,” he explained, dragging damp hair out of his eyes and looking up at his older brother’s confused face. “An Aetos breathing technique. Passed down from father to son for as long as we’ve had our name.”

“An Aetos technique,” Heron repeated doubtfully. “Then why is Niko the one teaching you this, and why haven’t I heard of it before today? If it’s father to son, our father should know it, shouldn’t he?”

“He does,” Myron said quietly.

“Wha-” His brother’s eyebrows furrowed. “That doesn’t… why?”

Why would their father keep such a thing from them, or why would Niko lie to Myron about it? Or, perhaps, why would Myron lie to his own brother about something like this? And if none of those, if Heron believed him and believed what Niko had told him, then why was Niko teaching Myron this secret inheritance and not Heron? It could have been any of them that Heron was asking. It could have been all of them at once.

So Myron told him the truth, though he knew it was likely a bad idea even as he did it.

He was his brother, for all their disagreements. He deserved to know.

So Myron explained their plan to his brother, even as his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed, even as his pneuma rose precipitously with his ire. Even as he turned his back on Myron and gathered up his clothes. Only when his brother had stalked out of their room and left him alone did Myron stop.

He pressed his burnt hands over his eyes and sighed heavily. Within his body, the two pneumatic chambers of his Hunting Bird’s Breath remained intact.

“I tried,” he muttered to the empty room.

S

He had done his best.

“You want to do what?” Castor demanded, in the quiet hollow where he carved the fruits of his cultivation into the trees. “Myron, he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be with us. Why in the world would you risk your life just to suffer another heartache when he tells it to you a second time?”

Truly, he had.

“Go after him?” Rena whispered, aghast, in the privacy of her mother’s library. “Myron… I miss him too, but you remember what he said. The way he spoke to us, like all this time we were only in his way. I just - what if he never changes his mind? What if he only hates us more the next time we meet?”

But effort hardly mattered in the end.

“Be patient, Myron,” Lydia commanded him, in the alcove that they the young pillars had carved out of the eastern mountain range for themselves and no one else. Sitting cross-legged beside her was the slave that had so often been in Sol’s company, breathing deeply while a newly awoken Citizen’s pneuma whirled clumsily around her. “Niko told us he’d get Uncle Damon’s permission in time. Until he does, and until we have a ship, there’s nothing we can do but wait. Refine ourselves. When the time comes, we’ll be ready. Focus on that.”

In the end, the result was all that mattered. All that remained was the sweet thrill of triumph.

Or failure’s bitter edge.

S

“Enter,” a deep and resonant voice spoke a bare moment before his knock struck the door. Myron exhaled slowly, marshaling his courage, and pressed open the door to the kyrios’ private office.

“Uncle Damon,” he greeted the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn. “Are you busy?”

“Always.” Myron’s uncle beckoned him forward with one hand anyway. He had a letter in his other hand, which he folded and tucked away while Myron approached his desk. “What brings you to my domain, nephew?”

Let it be known that Myron had done his best to be patient.

VS 1.109

The Young Griffon

It was said that there were as many paths to heaven as there were stars in the night sky. That platitude was one that countless cast-off sons and daughters of Helen clung to every day, assuring themselves of its absolution as soon as they awoke and seeking its cold comfort in the fleeting moments before Hypnos delivered them to rest. The sentiment was appealing, there was no arguing that.

Cultivation favored the bold, and it was the nature of bold men to chafe at the bonds of those that came before. It was only justice that a cultivator should walk his own path to the peak of the divine mountain. It was only virtue that he take for himself what none who came before could provide him.

Yet, the reality of things was that there was a difference between defiance for the pursuit of greater things, and defiance for the sake of defiance. The truth of the matter was that the young generation had a choice - take for themselves what their ancestors had spent their lives scraping through the dirt to achieve, and build upon that foundation a grander monument than any who’d come before could ever hope to match. Or, in spite, discard it, and spend their life scraping through the dirt just as their forefathers had.

It was a fine line to walk, and so alacrity of the spirit was required for any successful soul. Too complacent and you risked becoming a filial son, beholden to your betters and doomed to never outpace them. Too spiteful and you tempted the Fates, ignoring even the best aspects of your ancestry simply because you resent the association.

We loved the solitary rising star, but that didn’t change the fact that we cultivated within a framework based off of the best of our older generations. We refined our reason, our spirit, and our hunger, as distinct and meaningful portions of our bodies and souls, because a wise man of our older generation had spent his life scraping through the dirt for that insight. We sought virtue and lived in accordance to higher ideals, we slayed monsters and liberated our fellow men, and we did much and more because we wanted to measure ourselves against the greatest of the champions that had lit the walls of our nursery caves with the light of their passionate souls.

I’d walked the line between defiance and spite since I was a boy. No one sprang from the womb a master of all things, not even me, and so I took what deserved to be taken from the older generation when they offered it to me. From the charting of stars to the production of art and song, all the way to glorious pankration, I had learned early and often that irreverence was a competent man’s luxury.

Only a fool wasted an opportunity to refine himself. And regardless of what the wise men of the world might think, I was no fool.

“It’s still too crude,” my senior brother in Raging Heaven reproached me, dispelling the rushing wave of my rhetoric without much effort. Chilon clicked his tongue, circling around me in the sun-bathed sands of the stadium pit. “You’re prioritizing speed over substance. You can’t win an argument by speaking over your opponent - not in any way that matters.”

“Ho?” I raised an eyebrow, stretching my arms languidly while he circled around me. I was pleasantly tired, but my senses were as sharp as they’d ever been. “An argument of this nature is decided by the last man standing, is it not?”

I leveraged a plain truth, took from its simple strength and cast it out - battering the senior Philosopher with it like a storm’s wave battered a stranded ship.

[Better an ugly flower in full bloom than a withered rose bud.]

The storyteller’s lips twisted in distaste and I felt through my sophic sense the stirring of his own rhetoric as he readied a response. I pivoted on my heel and lunged, scattering his focus and tackling him bodily to the pit sand. His breath exploded out of him, and despite being my senior in age as well as refinement, his immediate attempt to slip my grapple was just shy of pitiful.

“If you can’t manifest your claim, what does it matter if it’s closer to the truth?” I demanded, rearing back and punching him squarely in his jaw. He grunted and thrashed like a beached fish, for all the good it did him. “If I can make my statement and prevent you from ever making yours, how can I be anything but the victor?”

Chilon opened his mouth to respond, and I slapped him across the face with a dozen pankration hands each from a different angle in a cascading sequence.

“If I silence your rhetoric before it can challenge mine, I win by default. Is that not so?”

“No-” he managed to get out, before I slapped him silent again.

“No? Here I am, speaking every word I care to say while your rhetoric lives and dies trapped inside your throat. What does that make me if not the victor?”

[A Tyrant] he intoned in the voice of his soul, and the force of it struck me across the face like a wild haymaker. I spun backward, rolling to my feet and working my jaw while Chilon did the same across from me. My senior initiate scowled at me in exasperation, prodding a loosened tooth with his tongue.

“Suppression is a crutch,” he explained to me, advancing forward. I strafed to the right, maintaining distance between us while I listened. “You’re faster than me, and you’re stronger - in a fight, you can keep my mouth shut if you really want to. But at that point, it can’t be said that we’re exchanging discourse. A conversation is a mutual endeavor, and suppressing the other party is as far from that spirit as one can get.”

“And that’s an issue,” I surmised, “because eventually I won’t be able to suppress my opponent.”

“With how you act?” Chilon snorted. “I’d be surprised if you could go a year of your life without drawing a stronger cultivator’s ire. Especially in this city.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“It is possible to be stronger than someone and also be right,” he explained. “Just because you can overpower an opposing sophist’s argument doesn’t mean you should. Debate a weaker man in good faith and win, and the result will be the same as if you’d beaten him down and choked him with his own unspoken rhetoric.”

“Is that not a point in favor of my approach?” I asked him curiously. “The result is the same, but the time wasted in debate is less.”

I ducked as he abruptly pivoted and swung a sloppy kick at my head. His speed was respectable for a man that spent far more time studying than training his body, but his form was still atrocious and full of tells. I lashed out and slapped the side of the knee that was carrying his weight, buckling it and nearly sending him back down to the sand.

Grimacing, he regained his balance and carried on.

“Your approach saves time at the expense of your own growth,” he said, kicking sand at my face to mask a roll towards my blindspot. I rolled my eyes and kicked sand right back in his face and he rolled past. His next words were forced out between sputtering coughs: “Debate a hundred weaker men and win a hundred honest times, and you’ll have the weight of each of those experiences behind you when you finally come across someone you can’t suppress with strength alone. Beat down a hundred men before they can speak their minds because you’d prefer not to waste the time, and you’ll be as worthless as a Citizen when it comes time to debate a man that’s stronger than you.”

“And what if there isn’t a stronger man?” I pressed with intent while he squinted in search of an opening. “What if I alone am the strongest man I’ll ever meet?”

“Arrogance,” was all he said before closing the gap again.

Where he delivered verbal instruction, I instructed my senior with physicality alone. He gave the exchange everything he had, though he was utterly out of breath and far from my equal in martial pursuits. I corrected the most egregious of his missteps with carefully placed pankration hands - slapping, poking, and prodding at the sensitive junctures of joints and tendons that were bearing too much or too little of his weight.

He swung at me with a right hook that was far more shoulder than it was hip, and I slapped it aside before demonstrating the proper form. I saw him realize his mistake a moment before I slammed the right hook into his kidney and folded him over my fist.

“There is always a bigger fish,” he wheezed. I hummed, conceding the point.

“For now.”

Pivoting, I gripped the back of the tunic he’d insisted on wearing even here for some bizarre reason, and heaved him up over my head before smashing him back down on the sand.

“Do it right ninety-nine times when it doesn’t matter, in preparation for the hundredth time when it does,” I summed it up while he struggled to rise. “That’s obvious enough. But you still haven’t explained to me why it’s wrong to favor speed over ‘substance’. If I’m against a stronger man, speed and succinct rhetoric will allow me to make my point before he can suppress me.”

I’d put to practice that theory against the Gadfly twice now, once leveraging the formative memory of my first time meeting the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god, and the second time assaulting him with the mad remembrance of the Orphic faith’s initiation rites. Both times, the speed and incomprehensible severity of my rhetoric had bought me a free moment to strike where every other attempt had flowed past him like water off a duck’s back. How could that be the wrong approach, when it was the only one that had shown the slightest bit of success?

“Speed will give you an opening to speak,” Chilon allowed, jabbing twice with a left and once with a right before attempting another hook, this time focusing on the strength supplied by his core. He exhaled sharply, putting his pneuma into it, and I caught it in three overlaid hands of pankration intent with a satisfied smirk. “However! You’re focusing on the wrong aspect of this.”

“Go on,” I encouraged him, matching his rising knee with my own and winking when he snarled a pained curse at the crack of bone-against-bone.

“Manifesting rhetoric is still an effort for you!” His voice rose in response to exhilaration and pain, and his pneuma rose to match it. “You have to think about it, and the more complex a statement, the longer it takes you to put vital breath to it! True?”

“True!”

We struck one another in rapid succession, each blow landed another point proven with martial strength alone. The storyteller struck me across the cheek and staggered sideways when I slammed a kick into his side. I struck him twice in the gut and then once in the throat when he lowered his arms to guard, and was pleasantly surprised when he struck back even while gagging. I danced back out of his reach, panting happily.

Hacking and staggering across the sand towards me, Chilon brought his lesson home.

“You can make a shallow point in a split second or a thoughtful statement in five! The way you’re approaching a debate right now, you’d rather make five of those shallow points than a single well-reasoned remark.”

“Because a split second is all any man has when defying higher power!” I fired back, leaning right to avoid his uppercut and slamming my forehead into his nose. The philosopher staggered back, clutching his nose while it poured blood onto the sand.

“Which is why I’m telling you your mentality is wrong.” Jaw clenching, he rushed in and tackled me to the sands. And so he sealed his fate. “You’re approaching this- urk!”

Twisting gracefully and bringing my leg up and around his neck, I locked my other leg ankle-over-ankle and pulled his face down into my stomach. He thrashed and struggled against the choke hold, but it was in vain. There was no escape for him now.

“You’re approaching this from the wrong direction,” he ground out, his face turning redder by the moment. “You don’t have to discard long-form sentiment in favor of speed. Instead of looking for arguments that you can fit into a single breath, refine your delivery.”

I tilted my head, looking down on him in rapt interest. “How?”

“Have you read the Broad’s Republic?” Chilon said with a purple face. I blinked.

“I have.”

“Do you…” The philosopher’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head. I loosened up my choke hold just enough for him to heave in a breath. “Do you remember the Gadfly’s analogy of the ship?”

“Of course.”

“Recite it to me,” Chilon demanded in a faint voice, his limbs hanging limp in the sand. “Like a philosopher.”

Frowning, I gathered up my influence and did so.

Within the framework of the Republic, the Gadfly had presented an analogy of a ship that suffered without a captain as an example against the rule of all - the democracy of an unfit mob. His argument had gone something like this:

[These men don’t understand that a true captain must pay attention to the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all that pertains to his craft, if he’s really to be the ruler of a ship. And they don’t believe that there is any craft that would enable him to determine how he should steer the ship, whether the others want him to or not, or any possibility of mastering this alleged craft or of practicing it at the same time as the craft of navigation. Don’t you think that the true captain will be called a real stargazer, a babbler, and a good-for-nothing by those who sail in ships governed in that way?]

The true thrust of the argument, that a democracy was only as good as its worst man and that the specialized men most suited to the task of leading were the ones least likely to have the role thrust upon them, was typical of the Broad Philosopher King. I felt the sentiment flow out of me over the course of precious seconds, a tidal wave of rhetoric. With no opposing argument to match it against, it dissipated in the air around us, but the weight of it was impressive on its own.

It was a shame that it was such a mouthful. I’d never get through even half of it against a half-decent opponent, let alone the man that had first delivered it-

[Democracy is a hammer in every hand, and all the world a nail.]

My eyes widened as I traced with my sophic sense that self-same wave, just as I had felt it before, crashing into the empty air. Formed in a bare fraction of the time, but nearly every bit as potent.

“I see.”

I released Chilon from the choke hold and let him roll away gasping. I stared up at the cloudless skies of oncoming spring.

A long-form argument condensed down to a single thread of rhetoric, with the proper consideration and delivery, could be almost as potent as the original. Perhaps, with the proper delivery, it could even be more.

Succinct, yet elaborate.

“Simple,” I mused. “Yet profound.”

Panting like a dog and leaking blood from his broken nose, Chilon weakly raised a hand and pointed it at me in a mentor’s satisfied affirmation.

1.108

The Son of Rome

As a melting pot of Greek culture, the city of Olympia celebrated more holidays and religious festivals than even the twice-lauded Coast - it was said that a citizen of the Half-Step City worked about as rarely as a slave enjoyed a day off, and that statement wasn’t all too distant from the truth.

Over the course of my year as a servant in the Rosy Dawn’s estates, I was offered two holidays of rest. Naturally, Griffon stole the first of them from me by sponsoring me through the cult’s initiation rites. The second, the Kronia that he’d named his starlight mare after, was the celebration of successful harvest and unity wherein slaves sat at the same tables as their masters. The day that slaves were served instead of serving had been my one and only day of true rest.

The more I interacted with the various factions present on Kaukoso Mons, the more I became convinced that the saying was true after all. It seemed like nearly every morning brought with it another celebration, every night a religious ceremony. As always, it was a mystery to me that the city-states could function at all. Their citizens, it seemed, did nothing but revel.

Though there could have admittedly been other motives at play.

“Sir,” a mystiko greeted me as I stepped out of my cave, his vibrant cult cloth of white-gold and canary yellow brushing the stone as he bowed respectfully to me. Deference to the man living in a cave and clothing himself in scraps of ragged cloth. I wondered if his ancestors were spitting blood at the sight of him. “Good morning, and well wishes from-”

“Why are you here?” I asked the initiate of the Waning Wax Cult. The man blinked, looking up at me in faint apprehension.

“I’m sorry?”

He was a product of the Alabaster Isles, though which of the scattered islands he’d come from was as much a mystery to me as the location of his cult. He looked like most of his ilk here on Kaukoso Mons - fine features and an aesthetic build free of scars, with well-kept silks to accentuate the body and make their sophic nature plain as day to anyone who cared to look. He wasn’t a fighter, despite what the man himself might have thought in the privacy of his own ego.

I stepped up closer, staring flatly down into his eyes. The senior sophist went very still.

“Why are you here?” I asked him again, quietly. “When you know that the others have never come this close before?”

The mystiko from Jason’s Alabaster Isles summoned up his bravado and stood up straight, putting our eyes nearly on the same level. He tilted his chin up so we’d be looking straight on at one another, masking it as a haughty gesture.

“I’m here because the others aren’t,” he asserted. He offered up a smirk. “Why fight the other suitors for a moment when I can walk another stade and have you to myself?”

“Have me to yourself,” I mused. “Do you know why no other mystiko has ventured this far up the mountain before you, philosopher?”

“The storm crown,” he said at once. “Most can’t stand the sight of it after going through the rites - it’s one of the better passive motivators that drives junior initiates to advance through the Raging Heaven’s hierarchy. The further you progress, the further down the mountain you’re allowed to go.”

He seemed pleased with his answer. Doubtlessly, he’d been sent here this morning to invite me to his cult’s portion of the mountain for some holiday or another, and here he’d found the perfect method to secure my time before anyone else. All he had to do was suffer the storm crown for a few moments. It was noble, really.

“No,” I said, dashing his hopes, and laid my hand on the crown of his head without applying any particular pressure. The philosopher’s head slammed back down into a bow like I’d dropped a boulder on his head. His eyes flew open wide, his knees bending beneath the weight of a hand that had no business being as heavy as it was.

“Hngh-!”

“It’s disrespectful to harass a man before his morning piss,” I informed the wisened scholar of Greek virtue. “And it’s foolish to tempt him, when the perceptions of your Elder stop at the line that you’ve so brazenly crossed.”

“What?” he breathed. I nodded gravely.

“That final stade you chose to walk is a stade your Elder will not trespass.” I tightened my grip on the crown of his head. His hair was soft and slick with olive oil, like he’d just taken a bath. “Do you think he’d send anyone up here to get you, should you not come back down? Do you think he cares more for you than he does his own image?”

We both knew the answer to that particular question.

“Apologies,” the scholar of Waning Wax rasped. “This lowly sophist begs the raven-”

The raven. It was what they all called me, when they called me anything besides ‘sir’. For all of our better intentions, Griffon and I had thoroughly failed in our attempt to maintain a plausible separation between our day and night personas. I was better known as the raven on this mountain than I was as Solus.

“Enough.” I let the man go and gently pressed an open palm to his chest. He staggered back three steps before regaining his balance. For a long beat of a moment, neither of us moved. I sighed. “I’m going to take that piss now. Leave.”

“Ah- yes, sir! Apologies, again, I’ll just-”

I stared flatly at him until he shut his mouth and rushed back down the mountain from whence he’d come.

When I finally made my way down the mountain to the line that the Elders’ wandering eyes would not cross, I found a delegation from the Coast’s Broken Tide, one from the Howling Wind, one from the Scattered Foam, and of course, the man with the oiled curls that had come to speak for the Waning Wax. They offered me food, water, and wine, in different styles and delicacies according to the bounties of their respective cities. Each of them offered me a place at their tables later that day, for some fabricated celebration or another.

The man in silks of white-gold and canary yellow was the last to step forward and make his case. The knowing looks from the other mystikos made it clear that they’d been waiting here when he went strutting past the unspoken boundary that separated the storm crown’s domain from the rest of the mountain. And they’d been waiting here still, when he came slinking back down to wait like the rest of them.

“Well?” I asked him, arms laden with gifts that reminded me all too clearly of the iron manacles I’d worn clapped around my wrists for the better part of a year. “What did you come here to say?”

Reluctantly, the man from the Alabaster Isles made his pitch.

“Today is the Adonia, you see, and the marble sisters of the cult were hoping you’d assume the role of Adonis-”

“Get out of my sight.”

His rivals watched him go with vindictive amusement, some more politely than others. The delegate from the Coast, a man with teeth like a shark’s and fishbone studs in his eyebrows, didn’t bother hiding his satisfaction at all. He chuckled openly, the flames behind his eyes dancing.

“The audacity of these juniors,” he said ruefully, shaking his head. The long braid of his dark hair swung to-and-fro with the motion, each glimpse revealing the razor sharp tooth of carved bronze hanging from it like a flail. “They’ll say anything to get what they want these days. Not a drop of shame in them.”

I eyed the Hero from the Broken Tide. “And you’re above that, are you?”

“Of course,” he said, grinning sharply. “I wouldn’t dare insult the raven by calling him a swan. Beyond a certain point, a flattering lie is more of a cruelty than a kindness, you know?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling me ugly?”

“I’m calling you to dinner.”

I inhaled slowly.

Diplomacy.

Exhaled.

“Fine.”

In the course of my years as a legionary, I had learned more from Gaius Julius Caesar than most men would ever know in their entire lives, and in the end it had only been enough to give me a proper frame of reference for all of the things I still did not understand - might not ever understand.

Still, a modest education in diplomacy was worth its weight in gold, and a lesson taught by the General of the West was worth far more than that. I didn’t have the breadth and depth of Gaius’ experience, it didn’t come nearly as easily to me as it did Aristotle, and I’d never have my father’s flair, but those were Roman standards. For this place? These people?

It was enough.

S

“Wicked, presumptuous raven-”

“Arrogant, thieving shade-”

“Foolish, starving child-”

Three Tyrants called upon him each in their domains, postured and insulted him each in their own special ways, and in the end made the same demands all three times.

“““Solus, son of Rome-”””

“““Let my Hero go.”””

Gaius had taught the raven diplomacy, but that wasn’t all. He’d taught the raven strategy as well. The raven knew that he was nothing to these Elders, no one at all. The only reason they courted him and haggled with him, like fishmongers instead of kings, was because he possessed a resource they could not live without.

A Tyrant, even a crippled existence like the Elders of the Raging Heaven, was above mortal concerns. The Civic and Sophic cultivators that languished beneath them weren’t worth much to them in the end, certainly not a moment’s inconvenience. There wasn’t a single one among them that would risk their reputation for a lowly mortal cultivator, regardless of their allegiance.

A Hero, though? That was a different existence altogether. That was a significant existence.

Before the raven’s father passed, in the early days of Gaius’ campaigns, he’d offered the raven a kernel of profound military wisdom. It went something like this:

In the forum, where food and drink was plentiful and no one truly wanted for anything, a loaf of bread and a jug of good wine cost just one brass coin - a single sestersius. But that same loaf of bread, and that same jug of good wine, when presented to a starving man on the furthest western waste of the uncivilized frontier? That bread and wine was priceless. The exact amount was immaterial in the end, because that starving man would pay any price to have his hunger fed.

Or he’d kill the merchant, and feast over his corpse.

The raven met with three Tyrants after the Hurricane Hierophant, and each time he knew that they wanted nothing more than to kill him where he stood and devour everything of worth he had. But they couldn’t, because he never brought the bread and wine with him. He kept it out of sight. Out of reach. Available to them, but only in the event that they settled to his terms.

At least, that was what he led them to believe.

In actuality, the raven known as Solus had no control at all over the Heroic cultivators that he had seemingly snatched from their sleeping beds. But that ivory lie was as good as horn when it suited Scythas, Jason, Kyno, and Elissa just as well to play along as it suited him.

And once the terms were set and properly sworn, that ivory became horn after all.

S

“They’re getting bolder every day,” Socrates observed, sitting cross-legged beside me while I forced myself through another set of push-ups. He was still covered head-to-toe in linen bandages, but he’d swapped the blood-stained ones out and had yet to stain the fresh ones. “The more you humor them, the worse it’ll get.”

I silently counted out my repetitions, focusing on the beat of my heart and the sweat dripping off the tip of my nose. The worst of my injuries from Thracia had been lessened to manageable hurts with time, good food, and dogged exercise. It was still an effort to move in even the simplest ways, little actions like blinking and opening my mouth to speak that I had never considered a luxury before what felt like lead weights were attached to every portion of me.

Every day the burden became just a bit less. Every day it became just a bit easier to rise. But the road ahead was long and grimly lit.

Once, and only once, I had attempted to invoke Gravitas as I had so many times before my advancement to the second rank of the Sophic Realm. It had slammed me flat, face-first through the mountain stone, and it was at that moment that I’d realized what I had only bleakly suspected before.

It may have felt as if I was carrying the weight of three thousand men since leaving the Orphic House, but the reality of things was far less impressive than that. As I was now, doing my daily calisthenics, I was only suffering a fraction of that weight. Not even a tenth. A hundredth, maybe. Thirty men and no more than that.

I still had a long way to go. A thousand miles left to march, and hardly any time at all to see it done.

The Elders of the Raging Heaven Cult were consolidating their forces and reaching for every weapon available to them. Among those weapons, their Heroic cultivators stood proudly above the rest. Griffon and I had disrupted them with our interference, more in the seizing of their Heroes than in the actual hunting of their crows, because the truth of things was simple.

A crow could be made to seem like more than they were, could even be given a shadowed sliver of their Tyrant’s strength, but that was all it was. A shadow. In the light of day it would be banished to the furthest corner of their soul, and they would be themselves again. A Hero, though? A Hero was himself regardless of imposition. Glorious. Defiant.

Triumphant.

A conflict was brewing in the sanctuary city of Olympia. In the coming weeks before the kyrioi came to see the Games, there would either be a peaceful consensus on the question of indigo succession, or there would be bloodshed. In our irreverent meddling, Griffon and I had placed our fingers on that precarious scale.

And then Socrates had lied to me, and I’d leapt up onto that scale without a second thought. Whatever came of this conflict now, a portion of that blame would be mine to take.

“You’re going to carry that weight.”

I grit my teeth and pressed against the stone.

1.107

The Young Griffon

Not everyone is made of iron, Griffon. For some, the fire only burns.

“Griffon?” A woman’s welcome voice woke me from my dozing. I opened my eyes and smiled languidly up at the Heroine standing over me, incredulous at the sight of me. “What are you doing here?” Above her, the marble columns of the indigo stadium jutted up into the clear blue skies, winding like vines up a formless tree and reaching vainly for heaven.

The Olympic Stadium was an architectural wonder in an entirely different class from my home city’s Scarlet Stadium, where I had ‘competed’ for glory in the Daylight Games more than half a year ago. Where the Scarlet Stadium was a product of man’s creation, carved out of the earth with mortal implements by mortal hands, the indigo amphitheater was ever more.

It rose up, a goliath of pristine marble in colonnades and archway paths that wound in a spiral up towards the clouds above. There were nine rows of marble columns, each level separated by entablature statues - carvings of men and women bracing their feet on the columns below and hunching their shoulders beneath the weight of the columns above. Each of them was carved as if in motion, the tendons in their legs rendered in profound detail, immortalizing the struggle of a step that they would forever be frozen in the middle of taking.

They were all marching up that winding path, carrying their colonnades with them up to heaven - the pillars of virtue each and every one of them had built within their souls. As my senior brother Chilon had informed me after our exchange of discourse, beaten and bloody but satisfied with his progress, every statue was a former victor of the Games. Every marble man and woman was someone that had stepped into this stadium a Hero and walked out of it a champion.

The indigo amphitheater was larger than any man made monument had a right to be, and its stands could seat nearly a hundred thousand spectators at its fullest capacity. It was an intimidating venue, more than any other I had ever set foot in. In its own way, empty as it currently was, it was more unsettling than anything I had seen in Thracia.

It also had a very comfortable sand pit.

“Elissa,” I greeted the Sword Song, shifting and patting the sand beside me invitingly. “The shade is pleasant here. If you lay in just the right spot, Diocles blocks the rays.” Across the indigo amphitheater, atop the first row of colonnades, the statue of a seven hundred year old champion strained against the weight of all eight levels above as he marched tirelessly up the spiraling path to heaven.

“You know that isn’t what I meant,” she said, rearing back her leg and laying a kick into my side. I caught it with a pankration hand and twisted sharply with two more, seeking to pull her off her feet.

The Sword Song pulled the bronze blade from the belt on her hip and drove it down through my violent intent, skewering me as surely as if through flesh and bone.

I cleared my throat and turned my head, spitting a mouthful of pink saliva onto the sand.

“Incredibly rude.”

Her eyes rolled. “This isn’t a public estate. More importantly, this isn’t safe. Look around you - this pit is crawling with cultivators from every faction in the Raging Heaven. What are you going to do if you’re recognized? What are you going to do if you’re confronted?”

“What do you think I’m going to do?” I asked her, honestly curious.

She sighed. “I don’t know why I bother.”

“What about you?” I continued, rising up onto one elbow and looking the Heroine up and down meaningfully. She was in her proper cult attire again - fuschia robes accented with winding lines of white and gold, and she had her eponymous bronze blade hanging unsheathed from the leather belt slung across her waist.

The last time we’d spoken to one another in her home, she had been disguised in plain clothes without her weapon at hand to give away her identity. Now here she stood, scolding me in plain view of the Raging Heaven Cult’s favored sons and daughters. A Heroine stolen in the night by hungry ravens, returned healthy and whole to the wider world.

“What are you going to do if someone tells your Elder they saw you here, speaking to me without any iron bands to bind you?” I asked the Sword Song. “What are you going to do when they realize you weren’t taken after all - that you went with us willingly?”

“Haven’t you heard?” she asked archly, procuring a rolled slip of papyrus from a fold in logic within her fuschia robes. “My shadowed captors have set me free.”

Elissa dropped the message on my chest, and I flicked it open with the hands of my intent, lighting the words with the rosy glow of dawn. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the contents of the message itself quickly identified the author.

“A message from your Elder,” I murmured, scanning each line with mounting admiration. I felt my lips twitch towards a smirk.

“It seems your master’s been busy,” Elissa said, feigning neutrality and failing utterly.

Audacious Roman. We’d only been back for two weeks, and he’d already made a mess of things.

“He sold you back for favorable terms.” I chuckled. “Who else has the Roman offered back to their distraught city?”

“Scythas was the first.” She walked past me and leaned back against the marble walls that separated the lowest level of the stands from the pit. “Nearly two months ago he vanishes without a trace and no one in Olympia can find him. Then your master is spotted with the Gadfly on his way out of the Howling Wind’s estate, and the next day Scythas is out and about in his cult silks like nothing happened in the first place.

“After that, the Broken Tide reached out. They were… displeased when Kyno was kidnapped. When he walked out of that meeting in one piece, the rest of the Elders seemed to realize there was a game to be played. Soter brought him into his confidence the next day, and that night I received this from his eagle.”

“Making you a free woman again. Congratulations,” I said, saluting her with the letter and flicking it back to her. She tucked it away, that neutral glare cracking at its edges. Hidden from me but not entirely silent, I felt the beat of her heart as it churned uneasily.

“What happened in Thracia?” she asked me. “When Solus sent us those letters, he made it sound like you’d be gathering up ingredients all at once. He said you wanted to have everything ready before you came back here. What changed?”

What had changed in Thracia? What had shifted in the Orphic House, and fallen firmly from its place on the journey back down the Aegean Sea?

My heart stirred in my chest.

There were any number of answers I could give to that question, each of them true - or rather, none of them a lie. But only one of them would answer her question in the spirit that she’d asked it.

“We met Orpheus,” I said, and my heart beat steadily in my chest.

“Griffon,” Elissa sighed, exasperated. When I didn’t smile or otherwise react, her brow furrowed, creasing the brutal lines of scars on her face. “You’re serious. You - what, you went to his tomb?”

“We did,” I confirmed. Again, I could have left it there, allowing her to draw what conclusions she would from that statement. But would that have been the truth? I elaborated, “And Sol and I spoke to his shade, ensconced inside his chthonic singing house.”

“You what?”

Elissa appeared over my head, staring down at me with wide eyes.

“You’re lying,” she accused me. I stared steadily up at her. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

How cruel, that a woman I had never lied to in my life would regard my word with such suspicion.

Though, had I ever told her the truth?

“Why didn’t you come with us, Elissa?” I asked the Sword Song. The desert-heat flames behind her eyes flickered in time with her heart, and she looked away.

“You know why.”

“Pretend that I don’t,” I invited her. “Enlighten me.”

“You know,” she insisted. “You can’t tell me you don’t know how ridiculous it all sounded. How convenient it was. The Gadfly decides he doesn’t like what we’re doing and ambushes us outside a bathhouse, drags your master up the mountain and throws you up into the storm crown - then, what? He decides it was all a misunderstanding? Solus makes amends, and they spend the next month as teacher and student in Bakkhos’ estate?

“Then you come roaring in and punch him in the throat, make a mess of the Oracles’ shared domicile and risk the wrath of every Tyrant on the mountain in the process, and the Gadfly rewards you with a quest? Suddenly, there’s a cure for the Scarlet Oracle where there wasn’t one for the last decade and a half? And the only way to synthesize it, of course, is to travel the full breadth of the free Mediterranean over the course of weeks and months when the Games are only a couple months away.”

“It was convenient,” I agreed. “For him more so than us.” Sol and I had known it from the start. The Gadfly didn’t know us nearly as well as he thought he did, but he’d known us well enough to know we’d jump at the opportunity if he waved it over our heads. “And yet. Serving his purposes, serving ours - do the two have to stand apart from one another? Bakkhos knew how to synthesize nectar from mortal materials. If he could do it, why not the Gadfly? Why not us?”

“You aren’t Bakkhos,” Elissa hissed. Frustrated that she even had to say something so obvious. “You aren’t Bakkhos, and you aren’t the Gadfly either. You’re just-” She spat a curse and turned away, stalking along the perimeter of the stadium away from me.

“You don’t believe,” I called, and she stopped in her tracks. “You think you don’t believe it’s possible, but there’s a part of you that knows it can be done, because Bakkhos did it. You don’t believe we’re capable of it. You don’t believe you’re capable of it. Why not?”

The Sword Song laid her palm on the hilt of her bronze blade. Her heart roiled in her chest.

“You said it yourself,” the Heroine muttered. “We’re all cowards in the end.”

Not every soul was tempered in flame.

I stood.

“Your master. Why did he leave?”

“What?” Elissa blinked and turned to face me fully. Distantly, across the vast sand arena that served as the staging ground for the Games themselves, cultivators from the Sophic Realm to the Heroic trained and fought and reveled in the midday sunlight.

“Why did your master leave the city of Olympia?” I pressed her, stepping across the sand. “And wherever he was going, why didn’t he take you with him?”

After Bakkhos’ funeral, I had shared drinks and played games with Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris in a crowded club while they told stories of the man in remembrance. One of those stories had been about Elissa’s master.

“They’d always been on friendly terms, but when my master decided he was leaving Olympia for good and severing all ties, the kyrios offered him a wager. A single sword exchange, no pneuma involved, and if the kyrios won my master had to keep his faith. They squared off in an octagon of marble and gold…”

That story had ended the way that every story of its kind ended for the kyrios - Bakkhos was victorious, and in the end he got his way. Well, the same story every time except for one.

“What does it matter?” Elissa asked, confused.

It was a fair question. The truth of things was, I didn’t know. I only had my suspicions. Since the day Sol and I had stepped off the Eos and into the city of Olympia, that was all I’d ever had. Suspicions, educated guesses, and instinctive impressions. Sol and I had decided on our way out of Bakkhos’ estate that we wanted to know these people, these Heroic souls that we had claimed within our hearts as our companions. We had each agreed that they were worth knowing.

Yet, what had I done to know them? What overtures had I made in good faith? It wasn’t a coincidence that of the six Heroic cultivators we’d grown so fond of, Sol’s three had agreed to lend themselves to our cause immediately, where mine had drawn back in suspicion and doubt - doubt of me, and doubt of themselves.

When we first met them, Elissa and Lefteris had derided Scythas and Jason as cowards. They had carried themselves with an unmistakably greater confidence, and that had drawn me to them over the Heroes that Sol had taken under his wing. And now, hardly two months later, Scythas walked as if with an entirely new purpose, with fire in his eyes, and Elissa turned away from prying eyes and called herself a coward.

What had changed them? Who had changed them. Which had been for better, and which had been for worse?

I had seen them for what they were, and simply made that fact known. That was what I’d thought at the time. What I’d known to be true. How could they improve upon themselves if no one had the temerity to make their weaknesses known? I was only challenging them. I was only reminding them that they were more.

That had been my intent. But what had been the result?

“You want people to meet your expectations. You want to help them exceed them.”

In the end, the girl had been right.

“You know why I’m here,” I said, and ignored the flickering of my heart. “What of the Sword Song? What is it you’re hoping to grasp alongside your glory when this stadium is filled end-to-end with spectators and the Olympic flame is lit?”

What did you see in the story of the Brothers Aetos that shook you to your core?

Elissa stared hard at me, gripping the hilt of her blade so hard that even her pale fingers visibly bled white from the pressure. Finally, she came to a decision.

“Tell me what really happened in Thracia. Trade me truth for truth.”

I tilted my head. “I already did.”

“You already lied,” she said derisively. “‘Spoke to Orpheus’, as if you were just passing through the underworld on an evening stroll-”

I reached up and grasped the thin plate of gold that I wore around my neck, beside the scarlet-jewel necklace I’d taken from my ancestor’s statue in the Aetos filial pools. I pulled the gift from Philadelphus up over my head and tossed it to Elissa. She caught it, confused, and at my inviting gesture began to read from it. Her lips moved silently, and I followed along - I’d already long memorized the contents of the totenpass.

You will find a spring on your left in the Unseen halls,

And by it the cypress with its luminous sheen.

Do not go near this spring or drink its water.

You will find another, cold water flowing from Mnemosyne’s lake;

Its guardians stand before it.

Say: “I am the son of earth and starry heaven, but of heaven is my birth.”

I am parched with thirst and dying: quickly, give it to me;

The cool water flowing from Mnemosyne’s lake.”

And they will give you water from the sacred spring,

And then you will join the Heroes at their rites.

This is darkness, folding you within it.

This is the end.

“What is this?” Elissa whispered, when she was done. My answer was mild.

“Directions for a stroll.”

1.106

The Son of Rome

The storm-crowned mountain was divided nine ways - eight grand estates acting as envoys for the greater mystery cults, each with its own Tyrant ruling in their consolation domain, and the rest of the mountain serving as the truly neutral ground that the Raging Heaven Cult’s otherwise unaffiliated initiates called their own.

When night fell and the Elders sent out their scavengers, there were few truly safe places for the independent cultivators of the Raging Heaven. An ambassador from the Howling Wind Cult, for example, could rest easy at night within Aleuas domain so long as the Tyrant accepted their presence there. An initiate of the Burning Dusk knew that the First Son to Burn would turn to ash any that reached into his domain for the things he considered to be his own.

Of course, that meant you had to spend your nights in a Tyrant’s domain. It was something most avoided - when they had the luxury of avoiding it, at any rate. Jason, Scythas, and Kyno had chosen to remain in their Raging Heaven quarters, risking midnight scavengers every night when the alternative was suffering the suffocating pressure of their Tyrants’ domains. Elissa, for her part, had secured lodging in the city of Olympia, separated entirely from the mountain cult. Anastasia did whatever it was Anastasia did.

And Lefteris hid in a cave.

There were only so many places a man could go once he’d caught the eye of the Raging Heaven’s Tyrant Elders. The city of Olympia was an option, but it had no inherent protections - Elissa was gambling each and every day as much as the Raging Heaven’s neutral cultivators were. Gambling on anonymity in the masses, and the hopeful presumption that the Elders wouldn’t care enough to comb through the city’s streets looking for her.

Outside of the city? No. Not as things were. On the mountain itself, on Kaukoso Mons, there were only three places that an Elder wouldn’t dare tread. First, and most obvious, was another Elder’s domain. Second was the Oracles’ den, deep within the mountain’s heart.

The first wasn’t an option for me, no matter what Aleuas offered. I wouldn’t step into his hurricane suite ever again if I could avoid it. The second had been possible before, when I was recovering from my first encounter with the Gadfly, but that had been before - back when I was a neutral party. That left the third option as my only option, the last place on Kaukoso Mons that an Elder would dare approach.

The Storm That Never Ceased.

There was a reason that the junior initiates slept in the estates nearest to the peak of the mountain, while the Elders had built their estates almost at the foot of it. The immortal storm crown was like a ward against their presence. Even, somehow, against their perceptions. The wandering eyes of Tyrants tasted like salt and ash on my tongue, something I had noticed the night of Bakkhos’ funeral and fully understood the night I stepped into Aleuas’ domain.

That chestnut smoke had followed me into and out of his personal quarters, up the winding mountain path nearly to its highest visible plateau - and then, when I finally reached the point where Socrates had carved out his hidden cave, close enough to the storm crown to feel its cool condensation in the air, the Hierophant’s eye turned away from me. Though it was less from me, and more from the storm.

For one reason or another, the peak was a safe haven. The only safe haven available to me after I barged into the one place I had no business being and made a mess of everything. So I followed in the footsteps of the Gadfly and sequestered myself beneath the crown where no one bothered to look. For the moment, I needed a place to fully recover from the wounds I’d suffered in Thracia. I needed a place to train my body, to contemplate the new weight that I carried in a far more literal sense now than I had before.

I needed a place to think.

When I left the Hurricane Hierophant’s domain and began my slow, painful climb through the shadows up the mountain, Socrates came to me in a rage. Wrapped up in bloodied linens like an Egyptian, and far more lively than he’d been the last time I saw him cradled in Griffon’s pankration palms.

I’d been so relieved by the surgery’s success that I’d hardly registered the actual words he was saying. But I had. And they’d hit me harder than a ballista bolt.

Aleuas had invited me to his estate the day after Bakkhos’ funeral, ostensibly to thank me for ‘helping’ Scythas in his pursuit of hunting crows, and I had ignored him for a reason. As things stood on this mountain, neutrality was a precious state of being. And while it could be said that our actions as ravens were as far from neutral as one could get, the fact was that we had attacked all of them equally. We weren’t affiliated with any of them. We weren’t beholden to anyone but ourselves, for better and for worse.

I’d changed that the night I walked into the Hierophant’s estate. But it had been a necessary evil. With Polyzalus on the loose, maddened by the loss of his daughter, none of us were safe, no matter where we went. If we were fortunate, Selene might find him before he found us. If we were beloved by the Fates, he might even accept what had happened without ripping our throats out anyway for the risk we’d taken with his daughter’s life.

I was wise enough to know the Fates despised me, and luck was rarely on my side. So I did the only thing I could think to do, and I committed. I reached for the only suitably powerful ally available to me. Because this was my fault, and because it was all that I could do.

Then, afterwards, Socrates explained to me that Polyzalus was still in his domain after all. He explained that it had been a ploy, a scheme to frighten us unruly children into doing the right thing, because he didn’t trust us to do it at his word.

He told me it had all been for nothing after all. For no one.

He’d lied.

S

“You want this king’s support? Those are my terms.”

“Deal.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear.”

“No. Properly. You’re a son of Raging Heaven, aren’t you?”

“I swear it. All of it, heart and soul, these terms upon the River Styx.”

“Upon the River Styx. And if either of us should waver, should either man break his word-”

“May Raging Heaven strike him down.”

S

Days passed.

My wounds were many and severe, but they were less debilitating every morning. The starlight marrow within me was somehow a more potent healing force now than it had been before, and after my first few hours of heavy exertion I realized the channels it had burnt through me were changed as well. They’d expanded and joined together, forming a cohesive spiraling network within my body.

While I waited out the days in Lefteris’ abandoned cave home, secluded beneath the light of the immortal storm crown, I passed the time by honing my body.

Socrates had told me in one of our first lessons that my split foundations had led to an imbalance in my cultivation. The portion of me that was Greek wasn’t strong enough to handle the portion of me that was Roman - that was his theory as to why I couldn’t perform even a single pushup while pressing down on myself with Gravitas.

My experience in Thracia had muddied the water on that theory, made things even more complicated than they had been before, but they had also made things simpler for me going forward. The why was a mess of possibilities, but right now the why of it didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was a weight that I was struggling to carry. And there was only one thing to do if I wanted to more easily carry it.

The sun rose and fell and rose again, and I honed my body beneath the curtain of raging heaven. Push-ups, sit-ups, sprints and long jumps and boot crawls across the stone. I worked myself to the brink of exhaustion, and then I worked myself beyond that. Over and over, until my body gave out on me and I collapsed. Unable to move, let alone scrounge for food and water.

Each time I did, an old man covered head to toe in bandages would sit down beside me and set a cup of water and a plate of food within my reach.

Each time, I ignored him.

“Boy.”

I forced myself to rise, to reach for strength that I had already depleted hours ago.

“Boy. I told you, this wasn’t what I intended.”

Though it felt like dying, I forced myself to stand.

“You can’t ignore me forever.”

And I made use of the alliance I’d wagered my soul to secure for no reason at all.

Every day, the Howling Wind Cult’s mystikos brought me clay jugs of water and an odd sparkling kykeon, along with baskets overflowing with produce and fish of every type. They never delivered it to me directly, of course.

They left it all just far enough from the storm crown that when I limped down the mountain to retrieve it, I would feel the brush of Aleuas’ wandering eye and taste the chestnut smoke in the air. It was a statement to his rivals as much as it was one to me.

Griffon and I had taken a piece of several of the Elders, maybe even all of them, and then we had aligned ourselves with the Gadfly. And now Aleuas had claimed a portion of that alliance through his connection to me. Every time he sent his cultivators up the mountain with jugs of wine and baskets of food in plain view of anyone that cared to look, he made a statement.

The raven and I are of one mind.

It shouldn’t have mattered. In a sane world, it wouldn’t have.

Days passed, then a week. One day, when I staggered down the mountain in search of food and water, I found the cultivators sent to deliver it still there in their viridian silks. And opposing them, I found three more in cerulean silks.

They were so absorbed in their vicious argument that they didn’t notice me until I was nearly upon them, the rumbling of the nearby storm and the uneven terrain masking my approach. When they did notice me, the man and woman from the Howling Wind went abruptly silent and stood up straight while their heads bowed.

“Good morning, sir,” they both said at the same time. Like I was someone worth greeting with respect. I frowned and dragged a hand through my hair, slick with sweat and long enough now that it fell into my eyes when it was wet.

“What is this?” I asked, and they both winced. They were the first words I’d spoken in days, and my voice had come out harsher than I’d intended it to.

“Apologies,” the man said, glaring out of the corner of his eye at the three from the Broken Tide who in turn were warily looking me up and down. I couldn’t imagine I was much to look at. “We were just making sure these three didn’t disturb you.”

“The Coast has a grand reputation,” the woman from the Howling Wind explained, her tone as ugly as his glare, “And its junior cultivators have a bad habit of mistaking their city’s renown for their own. They tend to forget they’re not the center of the world if they don’t have someone with sense around to remind them.”

One of the men from the broken tide snorted. “Be silent, little bird. The adults are going to speak for a moment.” The man and woman flanking him on either side whistled mockingly at the duo from the Hurricane Heights.

The messenger from the Broken Tide eyed me appraisingly. He was tall, sculpted beneath his cerulean silks and heavily tanned. His dark hair hung in a thick braid down his back, and his eyebrows were studded with what looked to be thin rods of bronze. He smiled, and his teeth were serrated like a shark’s.

His eyes burned with the low light of a Heroic flame.

It spoke to the courage of the man and woman bringing me my food and drink that they’d stayed to argue with a Heroic cultivator for as long as they had. Or perhaps it simply spoke to their confidence in my association with their faction.

“What do you want?” I asked the Hero with the shark-tooth smile.

“I want to know what it is exactly that the Hierophant sees in you,” he said, and extended a folded slip of papyrus towards me. When I reached out to take it, the acrid taste of pine smoke coated my tongue. “As does my honored Elder. He’d like to break bread with you tonight. Assuming, of course, you’re not otherwise indisposed?”

In a sane world, the allegiance of one battered Philosopher shouldn’t have meant a thing to a stalemate between kings and queens of virtue.

“Tonight,” I acquiesced.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a sane place.

This was the Raging Heaven Cult.

1.105 [Chilon]

Chilon

The Obol Orator

Every institution had its daily routines - the underlying maintenances and mechanisms that an outsider looking in might not necessarily see. Naturally, the more prestigious the institution and the grander its scale, the more opaque it became. There was appeal in a veil of transparent silks, as there was mystique in the shifting silhouettes behind a cloth curtain. What, then, lurked beyond the marble wall? A mystery.

As a boy in a no-name village far from any civilized place, those separations had been thin indeed. Children at play and students about their studies had mingled freely with their parents and mentors, the cleansing of garments and bodies had both been communal, and what hierarchy there had been paled in comparison to the stratification of the proud Greek city-states - to say nothing of the greater mystery cults housed within them.

Growing up, Chilon had known exactly who was harvesting the produce and butchering the meat that appeared on his table. He had known exactly who washed his clothes, how they did it, where and at what time of day. He knew who made those clothes, as he knew who made the pottery that held his wine and water. He’d seen for himself how his home was run. They made no secret of it, after all.

The Raging Heaven Cult was a different existence altogether. It prided itself on its secrecy, as all mystery cults did, and that mentality was reflected at every level. Even down to the minutiae of daily living.

Chilon woke with the dawn. At his level of refinement, a cultivator on the eighth step of the Sophic Realm, sleep was an indulgence more often than it was a necessity. In the course of his forty-odd years as an initiate of the Raging Heaven, he’d spent maybe a tenth of that time at rest. In his experience, the further he advanced through the realm of thinking men, the more his thoughts kept him up at night - and the less his body protested the lack of sleep.

Recently, though, his routine had changed. Rather than wandering Kaukoso Mons or the wilds beyond the city, Chilon stayed in his quarters at night. More often than not he kept a torch at hand and passed the time with a scroll of papyrus or a stack of clay tablets at his side, but occasionally he allowed himself to rest.

He wasn’t alone in this shift, he knew. Since the kyrios’ passing, the mountain trails of the Raging Heaven’s estates had been conspicuously empty past sunset. Her polished stone halls went untraversed.

No one wanted to be caught outside their rooms when the crows came calling.

They had all suffered in the weeks and months since the kyrios’ funeral, and none of them could say a thing about it - not to anyone capable of changing things. The Elders were on the hunt, and anyone caught in the middle of their game was nothing but an unfortunate casualty. The knowledge grated on Chilon, made him weary, and he saw that same weariness reflected in the hearts and minds of his juniors. His own peers, senior Philosophers whose wisdom would make waves in any other corner of the world. Here, they weren’t even worth the consideration of a warning.

But it would be a disservice to those that worked behind the marble wall to say that Chilon and his peers were the ones suffering the most from this hostile environment. It was easy to forget, easy not to consider it at all, but beyond the frightening majesty of the Storm That Never Ceased and the trappings of the indigo cult, there were flesh and blood servants that made the smallest wheels turn. Not cultivators like Chilon and his fellow initiates. Just men and women. Just slaves, at the mercy of grim scavengers.

Chilon rolled out of bed, scattering sheets of papyrus covered corner-to-corner in yesterday’s scribblings. There was a fresh set of silk robes folded neatly at the threshold to his quarters, predominantly white cloth with interweaving bolts of cerulean and crimson threaded through it. The senior members of the cult, the prodigies and predominant families, wore indigo. The lowest juniors wore pure white. Those like him, somewhere in between, wore a blend of white, indigo, red, and blue, depending on their relative standing within the cult.

Chilon donned cult attire that hadn’t been there when he went to sleep, and took a handful of berries and thoughtfully arranged meats from a table that hadn’t been there when he closed his door the night before. Absently popping a cut of lamb into his mouth, he drew his fishing net shut and heaved its contents over his shoulder. Ready to face the day.

Someone had made those things happen. It was something the juniors didn’t think about all that often, especially those that had come from aristocratic families already, but it was the truth all the same. A servant had come to his room in the night and quietly taken his unneeded things and left fresh ones in their place.

It was so obvious that it didn’t warrant observing, really. But in a place like this, it was easy to forget that the silks didn’t spin themselves, and the wine didn’t spring from the mountain’s amethyst veins into their waiting cups.

The Philosophers of the Raging Heaven Cult cowered in their rooms every night, while the servants carried on as always. Spinning the wheels that no one cared to see. Suffering the cruelty of crows because they didn’t have the choice of staying home until dawn.

It was wrong that they suffered, the servants as well as the initiates. But what could a man alone do?

Nothing but his best.

“Easy,” he corrected a boy that was young enough to be his son and nearly his equal in cultivation, a mid-rank philosopher in robes of deep cerulean and lightning threads of crimson.

The boy stiffened and stood up straighter, the opposite of what Chilon had advised. He glanced warily back at him, eyeing his attire and the fishing net full of scrolls and tablets he carried over his shoulder.

“Senior brother?” the boy asked, letting his sword fall to his side. He was polite, but only just. His annoyance at being interrupted was clear enough.

“Your stance is too stiff,” Chilon elaborated, moving up beside him. He’d glimpsed the boy practicing with his blade in the shade of a stone-garden grotto, and immediately picked out the leading flaw in his approach. “Let me guess - you’re trying to imitate the Sword Song?”

The boy’s irritation shifted at once to knee-jerk offense. He spun and jabbed his blade at Chilon’s chest. Chilon jerked back a step, and the boy sneered up at him.

“This lowly sophist thanks his wise senior for his attempt at guidance, but you’re mistaken. My style is mine.”

“You and I both know that isn’t true,” Chilon said patiently, skirting around the threatening edge of the blade and poking the boy’s wrist. “Again, you’re too stiff. You’ve done an admirable job of imitating the final step in a long and elaborate dance, but you don’t know any of the preceding steps or how to connect them. You can’t hear the song.”

“I told you-”

“Relax,” he urged the young mystiko, leaning down to press a hand against the back of his right knee so that it would reflexively bend. When the boy hissed and spun around with his blade, he quickly jerked away from it again. “These stances aren’t meant to be this stiff - the Sword Song was named for her fluidity, the grace of her motion. Every step should contain a portion of the step that came before and the step that follows after. Continuous-”

“Enough!” the boy snapped. His pneuma rose, his influence lashing out in the beginning of a tantrum. “Enough. I don’t need advice from a scribe without a blade, and I didn’t ask for it. Leave me be.”

Chilon looked him up and down with a critical eye. That had been better, in that moment where his temper nearly overcame him. “Have you tried thinking less about the forms?”

The boy blinked owlishly at him. His pneuma whirled around him. “You’re telling me to stop thinking?”

“It seems to be working against you,” Chilon agreed. The boy’s lips drew back from his teeth, an ugly expression to match his form.

“Old man,” he seethed, tensing, “Let’s exchange discourse.” All at once, his pneuma surged and his blade surged forward with his full weight behind it, a coiling thrust that Chilon had seen before in a far more sophisticated form.

Shifting sideways and letting the blade blow past him, Chilon swung the fishing net full of stories from over his shoulder and slammed it into the boy’s unguarded side.

The breath exploded out of the young sophist and his blade flew from his fingers, tumbling end over end in the grass while the boy flew across the shadowed grove and bounced off the face of Kaukoso Mons with an ugly crack. Chilon winced. A bit too hard, then.

“Do you know why that didn’t work?” he asked the boy, kneeling beside him and placing his sword gingerly outside of his reach.

The young mystiko glared blearily up at him, his eyes unfocused by the blow he’d taken to his head.

“Take your time,” Chilon told him.

The boy vomited on the grass between them.

More than a bit too hard. Something to keep in mind for the future.

“Y’er my sen’r,” the boy slurred, once he’d finished heaving up the contents of his breakfast. “Stronger. Fast’r.”

“Hardly.” He shook his head. “I’ve never been much of a fighter. But I didn’t have to be, when I knew what you were going to do before you did it. You’re too stiff - it makes you transparent to an opponent that cares to look.”

“But the Sword Song…”

“The Sword Song might use a thrust like that,” Chilon agreed, “but she’d do it as one part of a greater sequence, and her opponent wouldn’t be able to dodge it as easily as I dodged you, because she’d already have them cross-eyed. Each movement feeds into the next, and is fed into by the one that came before. It’s a simple style when you look at the individual steps, but together it’s profound.”

The boy forced himself up onto his hands and knees, wincing and squinting past the disoriented nausea. He reached falteringly for his blade, and Chilon guided his palm to the pommel.

“I don’t know the whole style,” he finally admitted, a fraction ashamed and a fraction horribly frustrated. “Only bits and pieces.”

“You’ll be better off looking elsewhere, then,” Chilon advised him. “It’s not a style that will serve you well in independent portions. You need the whole thing.”

“How do you know?” the boy demanded, lashing out again. “How are you an expert when you don’t even carry a sword!?”

It was a child’s anger, a child’s grief. Hopeless, impotent frustration, driven to a premature high by the tension every mystiko within the cult had been suffering since the kyrios’ death. The boy was a prodigy for his age, but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be stronger. Strong enough to feel safe when he slept at night.

A few weeks ago, Chilon might not have bothered engaging with him at all. He was a tragic sight, but there was no shortage of that on a mountain crawling with cultivators. Every day was a new conflict, a new series of highs and lows. Before, he would have shaken his head, perhaps uttered a quiet prayer for the boy, and continued on. It wasn’t as if he had any advice worth giving, after all.

Except, well. Perhaps that wasn’t true.

“I’m no expert,” he said, and when the boy drew up in outrage, he continued, “But I’ve seen an expert in action, and I remember the sight of it vividly. And I can tell the difference between an amateur, a master - right now, you aren’t either. You’re only pretending.”

The boy’s shoulders slumped. “I understand,” he muttered. “This lowly sophist thanks his senior brother for his guidance.” He forced himself to stand on wobbling legs and staggered away, towards the stone-carved trail that led back to the estate he shared with his fellow young prodigies.

Chilon frowned, watching him go. That hadn’t gone how he’d wanted it to. Unfortunately, he really wasn’t a martial expert - he couldn’t even be called a novice, really. What more could he do?

The fishing net of fables was a conspicuous weight on his back. He set his jaw and made a decision.

“Wait, little brother,” he called, and the boy begrudgingly paused. A moment later, he flinched and grasped clumsily for the papyrus scroll Chilon had thrown his way. Chilon winced. Right. The blow to the head. He probably should have handed it to him.

“What is this?” the boy asked once he’d secured it, squinting at the symbol embossed across its outer surface. A fuschia blade beneath a long-faded sun painted in blood.

“The full picture,” Chilon said, and turned back down the mountain. “If you truly want to be the next Sword Song, study it. That’s the story of the men she studied when she was your age.”

“Wha- this…” The boy stammered while Chilon descended the steps towards the city of Olympia. “Thank you, senior!” he finally shouted. Chilon smiled over his shoulder, waving a light goodbye.

It had been a priceless story, that one. He’d miss it in its absence. But that was alright. It wasn’t meant for him, in the end.

His fishing net was a ponderous weight on his back, but it was lighter than it had been a few weeks ago.

And it was growing lighter every day.

If he was ever to become the subject of inspiration and not simply the conveyer of it, he would need to be a man worth telling stories of. In order to advance, he had to refine himself in all ways. Body, mind, and soul. It was another one of those obvious truths that were all too often forgotten.

Chilon was a scholar far more than he was an athlete, he knew that well. But that wouldn’t ever change unless he made it so.

There were countless opportunities offered to the members of the Raging Heaven Cult, whether they be lectures or athletic venues and equipment. The grandest of those opportunities by far, though, was one offered only to the upper echelon of the cult - which Chilon was just barely a part of, thanks to his modest refinement and the decades he’d spent faithfully toiling as a disciple of Raging Heaven.

Though the masses would never in their entire lives set foot on its hallowed ground, the privileged members of the Half-Step City’s indigo cult were allowed the unsurpassed privilege of using the Olympic Stadium itself for their martial pursuits.

Whether it be athletic training in preparation for the legendary games that the stadium would play host to in just a few short months, or whether it was a more lethal sort of practice not suitable for the cramped courtyards and precarious plateaus available on the mountain, the stadium was open only to a precious few. So despite the fact that he was like an ant among ravenous lions, despite the fact that every day he was looked down upon by the Heroic cultivators that would soon be competing and the senior Philosophers that had devoted themselves to the martial path, Chilon made the journey every day and worked his body to the brutal edge of exhaustion.

It was the least he had to do if he wanted to be a man worth knowing someday.

The sun was high in the sky when he finally reached his usual place, in a secluded section of the stadium’s pit close to the stands. It was far enough from the handful of greater cultivators already at work training that he wouldn’t step on any toes, and wasn’t in danger of being stepped on in return.

He let his fishing net drop to the sand and unfurl, the scrolls and tablets remaining largely in place but for one that rolled away. He let it go and began his stretches. He’d gather it up later-

A formless hand that was as invisible to his eyes as it was vibrant to his cultivator’s sense plucked the scroll up and placed it back on top of the pile. Chilon blinked, and turned to face the pneuma limb’s source.

Ensconced in the shadows cast by the empty stands, a junior philosopher’s familiar scarlet eyes peering out at him.

“Griffon?” Chilon blurted, astonished. What was he doing here? He couldn’t possibly be among those allowed entrance - he hadn’t even gone through his rites yet. How had he gotten in?

The young man smiled languidly and rolled his shoulders, raising his left leg and then his right in a casual stretch.

“Hello again, senior,” the supposed scarlet son greeted him, and promptly manifested twenty-nine more hands of violent intent. “It’s been a while. What brings you to my domain?”

“‘Your domain’,” Chilon repeated, and couldn’t help but chuckle at the cheek of it. “You have some nerve, junior.” Nothing for it, he supposed. It didn’t seem like anyone else had noticed his presence yet, or if they had, they didn’t seem to care. “If you must know, I’m here to cultivate mass to match my virtue.”

“What a coincidence,” the scarlet-eyed philosopher said pleasantly. “So am I. Shall we trade discourse?”

Thirty hands of formless intent reached out to him in open offer, and were joined by one more of the boy’s own flesh and blood. Chilon shook his head, but reached out anyway and smacked his palm against the scarlet son’s.

“One round,” he acquiesced. “But be warned, I’ve already rattled one junior’s skull today. I don’t want to hear you complaining when I make it two.”

Griffon grinned.

“Of course, senior brother.”

1.104

After a brief existential crisis, we are officially back on track. I've unfortunately burnt through the six chapter backlog over the last couple weeks while struggling with an extended writers block, but I'm over the worst of it now. Hoping to build it back up ASAP. For now, hope you enjoy the chapter.

To all of you, my patrons, I want to thank you again for your help and let you know explicitly here for those that don't know my usual policy - if I make a promise, as I did last month, and fail to uphold it by falling behind on my x3 schedule, I will give you a refund if you desire it. I'm not trying to scam anyone out of their money, and I don't want you to come away from this story with a sour taste in your mouth because you you didn't get the value you paid for.

If anyone would like a refund for their April patronage, DM me and I will do my best to make it happen. Going forward, I'll do my level best not to let you down like I did last month.

§

The Young Griffon

A man's credibility was his myth made manifest.

Through reputation, renown. From renown, credibility. In credibility, ethos. If a scholar dealt in logic and a champion in his passion, a conqueror dealt in credibility. He spoke not as an impartial observer nor a proxy protector, but as a nation in and of himself. He spoke for others. Not to them, nor in the defense. The conqueror spoke from a position of authority in all things within his domain, and no one questioned him when he did it - because he was not trying to convince through theory, nor appeal to emotion.

Damon Aetos was Damon Aetos. He did not need to convince the Scarlet City to listen when he spoke. He did not need to make them weep tears of sorrow and joy with his words to convince them of his views. He was above that, just as Bakkhos had been above that in the Half-Step City.

A theory could be argued. Emotion could be questioned. These things were portions of a man, but only portions.

To deny a man’s credibility was to refute all that he was. It was an open invitation, a slap to the face, and a mocking interdiction - You are not who you say you are, your soul is not what you claim it to be, and you have no right to speak for those that suffer under your yoke. I refuse to allow it.

Naturally, this was a difficult stance to take against a Tyrant in their domain. It rarely ended well for the accuser, after all. But assuming the Tyrant was not who they claimed to be, assuming they did not deserve to speak for those beneath them, those they had claimed as a portion of their domain, it was possible to tear the crown from their head. It was possible to depose them from their throne.

It was possible to unmake them. So long as they were not who they claimed to be. So long as they strayed from the framework of principles they had sworn themselves to, they could be disanointed.

If they stayed true to their domain, though? If they were who they claimed to be in all things, at all times, in all ways? Well. If you were lucky, and the Fates were kind, perhaps they’d leave your family an intact corpse to burn.

Sol was playing an outrageously dangerous game, and the hilarity was that he wasn’t even aware that he was playing it. Not really. The world seen through his storm-gray eyes was as cruel as it was ungrateful, though he wouldn’t put it in those words. As he saw it, a man’s credibility was a blown-glass statue. Unmarred and upright in the light of day, it dazzled all who looked upon it.

But under duress, upon failure, a captain’s credibility did not chip or crumble like stone. It did not bend like a willow tree, surviving though the storm pressed it down. No. As my foolish Roman brother understood it, a captain’s ethos was as dazzling as glass. And just like glass, it shattered before it shifted.

Because of this bleak understanding, because his credibility as a captain was glass shards scattered at his feet, Sol didn’t view his actions for what they were. He deluded himself into believing that all the world saw things as he did, and so he didn’t even consider the reputation that he was constructing for himself in the hearts and minds of those his actions reached.

It made perfect sense to him that the speech he’d given in the wake of Chilon’s story had settled the question of his standing, because he’d only really heard a portion of it - even as he himself was saying the words.

“The city of Rome is salted ash. The half of my soul that lives in Rome wasn’t enough to bring down the demons from risen Carthage. The half of my soul that is Greek will have to do the rest.”

I failed, admits the captain, and in Sol’s rigid framework of military expectation his credibility shatters like so much glass.

I survived, the Heroes and Heroines of Greece hear the captain say, And because they failed to kill me I will do alone what fifty thousand men failed to - because even half of me is enough. Even half of me is worth more than all of you.

Perhaps it was a cultural gap, or else a nascent sense of humor from the primal shard of Babel that translated discourse exchanged between cultivators. Whatever the case, he failed to realize that a Greek placed a greater weight on one sentiment than the other. And so he carried on, assuming they continued to follow him out of unspoken camaraderie and not because he weighed every word that left his mouth like the Father himself was listening in Raging Heaven. Not because he took the burdens of others upon his shoulders like it was an expectation as much as a courtesy.

He had been everywhere in the world that was worth going to, it seemed. He spoke the Conqueror’s name without a grimace on his lips, observed his ruined cities and spoke to the sorrows of the fallen Macedonian empire as if he was speaking from personal experience. Because, from his point of view, his city had been every bit as glorious as the Conqueror’s, and so her fate had been every bit as tragic.

He spoke of a Tyrant’s mindset as though he was simply giving his own opinion, because his great-uncle’s lessons and behaviors were sacrosanct to him. How could Scythas or anyone else listening mistake that deference to his mentors for anything other than what it was? Surely his intent was perfectly clear. Surely.

You spoke to a dead god, the Hero of the Scything Squall clarifies.

Maybe. But it was brief, and it ended in disagreement, the Roman says, irritated and covered in burns, bruises, and bleeding wounds. But alive. One of Sol’s earliest introductions to Greek mystery cults had been the Rosy Dawn’s own initiation rites. Then, in Thracia, he had seen Scythas speak to a lesser mystery as if the chthonic hero was a drinking partner.

If a lesser mystery could be spoken to, could be heard from, why not a greater mystery? What was the distinction, in the end? He had no frame of reference. It was all equally absurd to him.

And of course, when the mentor of his mentor’s mentor, the teacher he shared with the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn Cult, slams into the side of our ship and is pulled burnt and half-dead from the sea, what does the captain do? Does he shy away from the wrath of the Tyrant Polyzalus, First Son to Burn? Does he heed the fierce commands of the Scholar himself to turn the ship around and sail far, far away? Naturally not. How could he?

This was his responsibility, after all. How could he run in any direction but towards it? No, Sol doesn’t turn away from the Tyrant on the shore. He vaults the rail and marches toward him. He tells Scythas what he intends to do, and when Scythas allows him to do it, he assumes it’s because Scythas has faith in Aleuas’ benevolence.

Scythas thinks he’s off to offer terms as an equal.

The problem with manufactured reputation, of course, was that eventually, someone challenged you. Some time, some place, as inevitable as the dawn that followed after dusk, credibility had to be proven. At some point, you had to be the man that everyone thought you to be. Otherwise, your ethos suffered. It might not shatter, not like glass as Sol saw it, but it would crack. It would crumble. And finger length by finger length, hand by hand, it would be made less.

And in the same way that failure weakened ethos, triumph made it even stronger.

“He did it,” Scythas whispered, golden wonder burning behind his eyes. We were at the furthest edge of the Raging Heaven Cult’s boundaries, crouched in the shadows beside the stairway to heaven, but that didn’t hinder the Hero. We were on Kaukoso Mons, and while Scythas was on the mountain, the wind carried every spoken word to his ear. The Hero turned to me, whispering in fierce excitement, “Griffon, he did it! Aleuas agreed!”

“The terms?” I murmured, brushing the raven’s midnight cloth away from the path of his shifting feet.

The Hero hurriedly relayed them to me. They were about what I’d expected. Sol had come to this mountain expecting a fight like none he’d ever faced alone before, and so he’d kept his demands simple and succinct. Aleuas would stand with us against Polyzalus if and when the need arose. In exchange, he’d return to the Hurricane Hierophant his favored Hero - eventually. He’d refrain from harassing the Howling Wind faction on Kaukoso Mons.

And someday, if and when the opportunity arose, he’d murder the Eye of the Storm and cast him down from his Hurricane Heights. On that point, we both agreed.

They were the best terms Sol could hope for, given the circumstances. It was simply misfortune that he was operating under a false premise, and reaching out for allies that he had no business speaking to as a result.

“Has the Gadfly made a mess of things yet?” I asked. Scythas shook his head, frowning even as his eyes flickered and went distant. He listened intently, but couldn’t hear anything.

“I can’t hear him. But… that doesn’t mean he isn’t there.”

Socrates was many things, most recently a fool, but he wasn’t an idiot. Our surgery had made him whole again, but he needed time to mend and he knew it. His mad dash back to Olympia had torn open enough of our surgical threads as it was, and he’d lost more blood in the last few hours than most mortal men had in their bodies to lose. He was weak. He was vulnerable. And though he would surely step in anyway if he felt Sol needed the help, he wouldn’t make things more complicated than they needed to be.

For now, Sol had made his case. And in so doing, he’d further cemented his credibility in Scythas’ mind.

I laid the back of my head against the mountain and contemplated the immortal storm crown above.

“You admire him,” I said, and Scythas blinked owlishly down at me.

“Solus?”

I hummed, confirming it.

“And if I do?” The Hero’s brow furrowed, his influence lapping like low tide at the edge of my perception. “Are you saying you don’t? He’s your mentor.”

My mentor. A truth, technically. Sol had taught me more than any of the old men assigned to me as tutors in the Rosy Dawn, directly and indirectly. I considered him a master in the fields that suited him best, because I’d never met a soul with greater resolve than his. But did that make him my mentor in the spirit that the term was meant?

“I have a question,” I declared. The Hero rolled his eyes.

“I thought you weren’t ever going to ask me anything again.”

“Until we died or each ascended,” I agreed. And we had died, each of us in a way. Our current predicament was the product of Selene’s spirit marble statues crumbling to pieces, because for a brief moment the two of them had stepped out of the land of the living and into the dark land of the dead. Sol and I, on the other hand, had died a much more literal death - with each turn of the wheel, we had felt that last scarlet thread of life leave us. It had been a true lived experience, even if it hadn’t been exactly ours.

My heart flickered in my chest, a bare murmur to my new Heroic sense. I frowned faintly up at raging heaven, contemplating the distinction.

All this time, I’d been more than happy to stoke the flame of misconception and that which resided between truth and a lie.

“How did you become a Hero, Scythas?” I asked. The fair Hero’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“... I already told you-”

“You told us you threatened the Eye of the Storm in his own domain,” I overrode him, watching lightning flash a dozen times in the span of a bare heartbeat. There was something about the Raging Heaven’s estates that blunted the noise of the storm, but it was always there. Impossible to ignore.

“You painted us a picture of a Philosopher on the brink of glory, but you didn’t light the flame. The kyrios of your cult backed down, in the end. So what drove you over the edge? How did you become the Hero of the Scything Squall, and how did you end up here in Olympia while the brother you risked everything to protect languishes alone in the City of Squalls?”

Scythas bit his lip, wavering between knee-jerk denial and his heart’s desire to speak the truth of things. I gave him the final push he needed.

“The morning after the funeral, in that drinking club.” A quiet intonation. The fight went out of him. “I told you Sol had come from afar to visit your city for a taste of true culture. Do you remember what else I said?” We both knew that he did.

“You said that he was fighting demons,” Scythas whispered.

“Demons, on the western front,” I echoed. “Anastasia didn’t react to that statement at all, in any way that I could see at least. Maybe she already suspected. Jason was surprised, but not half as much as you.”

Demons on the western front, I’d said gaily, and Scythas had turned to regard my Roman brother like a drowning man regarded an approaching ship.

“There is a gap between the day you spit in the Eye of the Storm and the day you first climbed this stairway to raging heaven,” I concluded. “What took place within that gap?”

If I’d asked the question a week ago, he wouldn’t have even considered answering. But Thracia had changed things. For all of us.

“The kyrios…” Scythas eventually said, and the tone of his voice made it clear he wasn’t talking about Bakkhos. “He couldn’t stand the sight of me after that day. He didn’t want anything to do with me, but he couldn’t admit why because it would weaken his image. So he entrusted me with a task suitable to the Howling Wind’s prodigious son. Something that anyone could agree was of vital importance.”

“That being?”

“Expansion,” he said, and his eyes turned west. Haunted, in a way that was all too similar to Sol’s when he reminisced on his legion days. “The land that houses the City of Squalls used to go by another name - the Breadbasket. Before the winds tore the crops out of the earth like a thousand-thousand scythes, it was a nation of plenty. Every year was a successful harvest. Hunger was a distant, impersonal threat.”

“Until the hurricane,” I mused.

“Until the hurricane. Since then, the lands have been destitute and the City of Squalls has been dependent on the imports of its more prosperous neighbors for the basic necessities of grain and wine. That dependence is a weakness. But what else can we do? The storm is there to stay. What else is there to do but expand?”

“And your kyrios chose to expand west, across the sea,” I realized.

“Why not?” Scythas smiled mirthlessly. Shrugged. “There’s nothing across the Ionian but scarlet sons, barbarians, and stades and stades of lush land just waiting for the touch of a civilized hand. The Eye of the Storm gave me a band of my brothers and sisters within the cult to accompany me in my expedition, for appearances sake and to rid the cult of those fondest of me and my brother, and he told me not to come back until I’d secured a sustainable colony for his city.”

The Hero tilted his head, looking knowingly down at me once more.

“Do you know what we found on the western frontier, Griffon?”

Salt and ash, and howling on the wind.

“How many of you made it back across the sea?” I asked. The Hero stared silently down at me. “Ah.”

The truth of the Hero’s journey was the tribulation was a certainty more than it was a threat. Tragedy came for us all at one point or another. The only question was whether it came at the beginning or the end.

Damon and Anargyros Aetos had ascended to the Heroic Realm in glory.

Scythas had ascended in tragedy.

“... Why do you ask?” Scythas pressed me after a long beat. On the horizon, the first slivers of dawn were beginning to make themselves known.

“You admire Sol,” I said, because it needed to be said again. When Scythas rolled his eyes and made to speak, I waved him silent. “You’ve decided to throw in with him, and that’s fine. So long as you know what you’re throwing in with. So long as you’re prepared for what comes next.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled.

“Sol has decided he’s going to help you murder your Tyrant, and so we’ll see it done,” I declared, and my heart did not waver at the truth of it. “But are you prepared to stand beside him, as he’s prepared to stand beside you?”

“Of course-!”

“Are you?” I pressed, rising to my feet and leaning in close. I didn’t harry him with pankration hands, or leer as I might have before. I stared intently into his eyes. After a moment, he found his grit and glared right back.

“I am.”

“Good,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “Because when all is said and done, he isn’t going to sit himself down on this city’s indigo throne and content himself with Bakkhos’ laurels. He’s going to take everything he can get his hands on, he’s going to throw it all across his shoulders like a yoke, and he’s going to march across the Ionian while he sings a legion song.”

Scythas’ jaw clenched. But to the Hero’s credit, he did not look away.

“You both escaped the demons once,” I said in quiet warning. “But Sol will never be content with just surviving. If you’re with him, you’re against the western horde.”

Scythas turned his head, finally breaking our staredown -

And spit on the amethyst veins that lined the Raging Heaven’s mountain.

“Good.”

I felt myself smile.

This world was iron. Its Heroic souls were battered and dim, made less by Tyrants and their tragedies. It was a shadow of what it should have been.

But it didn’t have to remain that way.

1.103 [Aleuas Pyrrhos]

The Hurricane Hierophant, Aleuas Pyrrhos

When the kyrios came for Aleuas, he was dressed in nothing but shadow and rags.

That had been over five hundred years ago. Five hundred and fifty-four years to be exact. In fact, two months from now it would be five hundred and fifty-five.

In the course of his years, time had loosened its grip on Aleuas - as a child, so long ago now that entire civilizations had risen and fallen in the intervening centuries, a year had seemed like a wondrous eternity. As a man grown, a year had seemed like a short time after all. A decade, though, was certainly still a daunting prospect. When Aleuas became properly old by the standards of mortal men, he realized that a decade was hardly any time at all. But a century? That was a mystifying prospect indeed.

These days, it seemed as though he’d miss a century if he blinked. Men and women lived and died, left behind descendants that lived and died, left behind monuments to their great ancestors that eroded and fell to pieces in the earth, and Aleuas drifted through it all. Past a certain point, perhaps since the fall of his own dynasty, time unwound itself from his notice and his care. It ceased to matter what year it was, let alone the month. Holidays came and went. The seasons passed.

So long as he remained on this accursed mountain, there was only one measure of time that mattered. And so it was the only one that Aleuas kept coalescent in his mind.

It had been five hundred and fifty-four years since the Tyrant Riot took his crown from him and dragged him from his throne. In two and a half months the Olympic Flame would be lit in anticipation of the Games, and it would become five hundred and fifty-five.

Five hundred and fifty-four years ago, the Tyrant Riot came to Aleuas’ kingdom in shadows and rags. He didn’t have a strip of leather for his feet, not a sack of cloth to carry his belongings - not that he had any belongings in the first place. When he came to Aleuas, the kyrios was seemingly no kyrios at all.

The Tyrant Riot did not approach the Hurricane Hierophant as a superior. He didn’t even approach him as an equal. When the kyrios came to Aleuas, it was as a pauper without a drachma to his name.

He came to him as a foreigner.

“I am a stranger in a foreign land,” the raven known as Solus spoke, his voice a sea of thousands, each one’s whispering imposed over the rest. “I came here, to this city, on the night of your kyrios’ funeral. On that day my goals had nothing at all to do with you or your contemporaries. I came here to find an old mentor and ask him for his wisdom. Nothing more.”

“And since then?” Aleuas asked, shifting idly on the massive plush lounge that the Tyrant Riot had built for him with his own hands. No matter how much time passed or how many cushions he heaped upon it, it was never any more comfortable.

“Since then, I’ve seen acts of such atrocious cruelty that it makes me sick to remember them.” The raven tilted his head back, and though he was hardly more than half the Hierophant’s size, Aleuas knew the scavenger was looking down his nose at him. “I’ve seen citizens of Olympia curled up on the streets with bleeding ears, screaming in helpless agony while their city’s strongest souls mercilessly beat their drums. I’ve seen members of the Raging Heaven stolen off the streets, stolen out of empty halls, stolen from their beds - each time by their very own brothers and sisters within the cult.”

“Truly foul behavior,” Aleuas said sympathetically, considering the bone-white olive branch balanced between his fingers. It was light. Lighter than air, it seemed. And at the same time, heavy enough for even a Tyrant to notice its weight.

“Foul. Yes.”

The Hurricane Hierophant tucked the olive branch behind his ear.

“So to right the wrongs of we sovereign souls, you added on your own?” he asked the raven pointedly, applying a portion of his ethos to the words. If the scavenger felt the pressure, he didn’t let it show. Aleuas frowned and added more. “You took from all of us a portion of our strength. You took our marrow. You took our crows. You took our Heroes.”

The scavenger’s eerie, faceless veil did not waver. In his hurricane domain, Aleuas could see what lay beyond the viridian curtain as clearly as anything else. But when it came to that midnight veil, he might as well have been looking through the curtain with mortal eyes. Either way, it was nothing but a blackened silhouette.

The raven cawed mockingly at him, in his voice of three thousand shadowed whispers.

“I only took what begged me to be taken.”

There is an old and oft forgotten concept known as xenia. The ritual of friendship between guest and host. The reciprocity of kindness between two strangers.

In the distant, distant past, before even Aleuas’ time, there was a universal expectation of hospitality in the civilized Mediterranean. In those mad and glorious days when the divine walked the earth alongside their lessers, it was understood that any vagrant could be a god or goddess in disguise. Because of this, and because the Father was known to check, every free citizen with sense enough to breathe showed an enduring sympathy for those that darkened their door as guests. You never knew, after all.

For their hospitality, a kind host could find themselves rewarded with blessings and wealth beyond their wildest imagining. For their abuse, a cruel host could find themselves struck down. Suffering, endlessly, for a crime against a higher power that they hadn’t even known they were committing until it was already far too late.

It was an old understanding, dated by its presumptions. Chief among them, of course, was the presumption that a king in his domain could be threatened in any way at all by a maligned pauper. After all, the world that Aleuas had been born into, the world that he had risen through, was not one of mad glory. It was cold and abandoned. As Aleuas had stood at his peak, only a heavenly body could have hoped to match him on his throne. And the only heavenly bodies to be found beneath the curtain of heaven were corpses.

The tyrants of the world had stopped caring for the ritual of friendship long before Aleuas was born. A king in his domain could decide things for himself. They could accept a guest and lavish them with gifts, or they could return them to the earth. The result was the same in the end.

Everyone knew that the Father wasn’t checking anymore. Why suffer the insult, then?

Xenia was before the king’s time.

And so, when a man in shadow and rags came to him with nothing to offer but mad ramblings and a pair of empty, outstretched hands, Aleuas did not regard him as a friend. He regarded the vagrant as he was.

Nothing.

No one.

The Half-Step City of Olympia was a safe haven, a sanctuary that stood apart from the myriad conflicts and crises that so often plagued the free city-states. Since its inception as a venue for the Olympic Games, it had stood shining and unchallenged by any of its sister cities. And in that same way, so had the Raging Heaven Cult stood uncontested by its sister cults of greater mystery.

The Raging Heaven Cult had eight elders - one for every greater mystery cult outside the Half-Step City, sans the Rosy Dawn. Each of these elders was a Tyrant beaten and dragged from their domains. Each of these elders, Aleuas among them, was a sovereign soul that the Tyrant Riot had disanointed in flagrant disregard for their ethos.

The kyrios had taken Aleuas and each of his fellow elders in hand, taken them from their homes and placed them beneath him. And when that was done, he had gone a step further beyond. When that humiliation was not enough to satiate him, he had added another insult to their injuries.

He had given to them a portion of himself.

Hunger was a Tyrant’s curse. A cosmic cruelty handed down by their absent Father in Raging Heaven. Where a Philosopher wondered unto death, and a Hero burned themselves to ash, a Tyrant hungered. A Tyrant starved. And inevitably, a Tyrant died. Hollow. Malnourished.

Empty.

It was in their nature to consume everything they could until that bleak future became a present reality. Even if they could only ever temporarily fill that void, a stay of execution was better than nothing at all. So they ate. They devoured. And they took what they could. Because some things were simply true. And every king knew that while he could afford to be generous in certain material ways, he could never part with the wealth inside his soul.

And in spite of that, the Tyrant Riot gave a portion of himself to each of them his broken elders. A portion of his own marrow, the wealth within his bones. No matter how many centuries passed, Aleuas would never forget the moment that string of blood touched his tongue. He would never forget the way it burned. Like starlight itself.

“You’re worth less now than you were before,” the kyrios had spoken over Aleuas’ broken body, pouring his scarlet marrow into the Hierophant’s open mouth-

Aleuas blinked.

“Come again?”

“You’re worth less now than you were before,” the raven known as Solus repeated. “You’re a shadow of yourself.”

[My shadow, now.]

“I’ve killed men for far lesser insults than that.”

Aleuas’ hurricane domain roiled at his discontent. The windchimes in his quarters clattered and struck one another in a grating cacophony of noise. The viridian curtain snapped and fluttered violently, remaining in one piece only because he willed it to be so. Had it been any of the Howling Wind Cult’s mortal cultivators sitting in this room with him, they would have already been prostrated and in hysterics, if not unconscious.

The raven was unmoved.

“And yet here I am. Alive. Why is that?”

“I’m beginning to wonder the same thing.”

Had they both been standing, the wretched scavenger wouldn’t have been much taller than the Hierophant’s navel. There was nothing tyrannical about his stature. Nothing remarkable at all about him. And for all that Aleuas could have willed himself to be nearly any shape or size he wished here in his hurricane suite, that was because it was his domain. The same was not at all true for the raven.

So why did it feel as though he’d lived this moment once before?

A vagrant enters the City of Squalls and begs its kyrios for the grace of his hospitality.

He is a ragged sight, covered in scrapes and scratches from the storm. He stinks of sour wine and staggers like a drunk through the marble halls of the Hierophant's estate, because that is what he is. A lush without the sense to know what it is he asks, and who he asks it of.

Yet he climbs one of the serpent lines that dangle from the floating city, and he navigates the shadowed city with such familiarity that it’s as if he built it all himself. He appears on the threshold of the king’s quarters before his elders and his aristois can so much as blink. And in a pitiful whisper of gravel and pain, he asks the Hurricane Hierophant for a place at his table - among his confidants.

Only until the sun rises, the vagrant assures the King of Seers. Just until dawn.

Bemused, the king asks him what he has to offer in return for an honor that any of his citizens would kill for. The vagrant spreads his empty hands, and says that he can only offer the Hierophant a story of the world outside of his domain. Knowledge is the best that he can do.

The king bids him to speak.

“As I was saying, the Tyrant Aleuas before me is a shadow of his former glory. Your contemporaries are the same. Eight elders, eight tyrants imprisoned by the Tyrant Riot. Confined to quarters for centuries.”

The Hierophant sneered. “‘Confined to quarters,’ he says. As if I’m a prisoner in my own domain.”

“Aren’t you?”

“You were at the man’s funeral. You know that I was there.”

As Aleuas knew that the man known as Solus had been there, too. There, in the scarlet and white attire of a cult that had no business in the Half-Step City. He had been there with another, and both of them had stuck their noses into business that wasn’t theirs. Both of them had laid their greedy hands on the property of Aleuas and his rivals.

“One night out and not another one since,” the raven mused. “Why is that?”

“Perhaps you’re too young to understand,” Aleuas said. “Two months is no time at all for those of our standing. Past a certain level of refinement, a man can spend decades behind closed doors before emerging for hunger or thirst.”

“I see,” the raven murmured. “In that case, will you still be behind closed doors when the kyrioi come for the indigo throne?”

“You dare?” The hierophant asked quietly, layering threat over top of ethos.

The shadowed cloak that the raven wore over his left shoulder undulated in the flickering candlelight.

“I care. I’ve come to you in good faith, alone, because I found this city in a state of crisis and I have good reason to want it made whole again. You take offense to being called a shadow, but how could I have meant it as an insult? I’m a shadow, too.”

The raven spread his empty hands. Aleuas stared hard at him through the viridian curtain.

“I am worldly but not altogether wise, so please enlighten me: if you are not a shadow, then why won’t you leave your ivory suite unless your fellow elders have left theirs first?”

The Hierophant was silent.

“I’ve seen this sight before.”

“Is that so?” he rumbled. The curtain quivered.

“Each of you covets the same prize, but only one among eight can have it in the end. You were kyrioi once, unchallenged above all, but that was centuries ago. Captivity has stolen your edge. Time has made a shadow of you. You all refuse to act, because the first to move will be torn apart by the rest. Yet there is a deadline to this uneasy peace, and each of you knows it.

“Seven sovereign souls is competition enough. In two months time, however, the competitors will arrive for their mandatory month of training prior to the Olympic Games. The city of Olympia will be full to bursting with glorious, defiant souls. And a month after that, the kyrioi of the greater mystery cults will come from every corner of the free world, the lords and ladies that took your thrones, and the number of Tyrants in your way will have doubled overnight.”

“The raven has eyes,” Aleuas finally said. “Tell the king, then - where is Olympus Mons?”

“Half a step from here,” came the reply.

The vagrant tells tales of the outside world, and every one of them is a lie.

He is unwell, that much is clear to see. He won’t drink water, only wine, and that is surely a part of it. He rants and raves about past disasters that couldn’t have possibly taken place, natural catastrophes that would have scarred the earth in its entirety if they had truly come to pass. No matter how many of the king’s court challenge him, he insists up and down that every story is true.

And he warns the king. He warns him that the world is changing. He warns him that if he doesn’t change alongside it, he’ll be crushed beneath the wheel.

Just like his serpent-mother.

“You understand that this is a sanctified city,” Aleuas said, waiting for the raven to voice his agreement.

“I do.”

“And knowing that, do you think I’m mad enough to wage war here? Do you think any of my peers are that mad?”

“I do.”

“Who among them?”

“Polyzalus.”

“... and if he does? You propose to stand with us against a member of your own city?”

“Alikos isn’t my city.”

Who are you to lecture me? The monarch demanded. Where is your crown? What is your domain? Who are the people that call you king?

I have no crown, replied the stranger. No name worth knowing either. I am the king of nothing. King of no one at all.

The monarch sneered. Then who are you to speak to me as an equal?

“You said you’d return Scythas to me. When?” the Hurricane Hierophant asked. As he did, he was cognizant of the young woman listening furtively just outside the doorway that the raven had entered through. He’d known she was there from the start, of course. She might have been able to slip by the raven’s notice, but a daughter couldn’t hide from her father.

“Soon.”

“Soon,” he echoed. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because we share a common enemy.”

“Oh?”

“The Eye of the Storm.”

The viridian curtain flung itself apart, and Aleuas Pyrrhos stood up from his lounge. At his full height, he towered over the raven. He took a single step forward and was abruptly in front of him. That midnight veil tilted up to regard him.

“Scythas told me about you, before you stole him away,” Aleuas said intently. “So tell me, Solus, why would a son of Rome want my successor dead? What reason do you have to hate the man that rules in the Hurricane Heights?”

“Because he deserves to die.”

“By whose measure?” the Hierophant demanded, though he did not disagree. “Rome’s?”

“By mine.”

Aleuas sneered at the ragged man in his cloak of shifting shadows. “And who are you?”

The raven considered the question for a long, pensive moment. When he answered, Aleuas heard it echoed through three thousand voices.

And through five hundred and fifty-four years, as well.

“I am a son of raging heaven.”

Every one of his senses told Aleuas that the boy sitting before him in a raven’s cloak was nothing more than what he’d appeared to be the night of the funeral. A junior Philosopher, hardly worth the effort of dismissing from existence. A Tyrant trusted their own instinct above all else, and Aleuas’ instinct told him to put an end to him now, before the boy could think to offer him another insult. His gut told him to strike.

And yet. Even so.

“You must be thirsty.” Aleuas reached into the open air and pulled from it a cup of water. Leaning down, he offered it to the raven.

“No need. I brought my own.” That said, the raven reached into the shadow of his cloak and pulled from it a golden cup of wine, the smell of it all too familiar. If the Tyrant still had a beating heart in his chest, it might have stopped at that moment.

The concept of xenia dictated that a host should treat each and every stranger as a friend, because you could never be sure of what lurked behind anonymity’s gossamer veil.

The Tyrant Aleuas Pyrrhos had ignored that sacred obligation five hundred and fifty-four years ago, and thrown a mad man out on his head after he’d grown tired of his rambling. In return, the shadows of his own kingdom had risen up and overthrew him. Up until that moment, up until the very last instant before madness consumed him and all that he had gained was taken from his hands, Aleuas had been certain that he was dealing with somebody entirely inconsequential.

He had erred.

He wouldn’t err again.

1.102

The Son of Rome

At some point in our journey through the Orphic faith, the raven’s mantle had changed.

The furthest outpost of the Howling Wind Cult estates on Kaukoso Mons was manned by a Sophic cultivator near the peak of his realm. He was an imposing figure, likely chosen for his stature as much as his advancement, with scars and a permanent scowl to accent the controlled malice in his dark eyes. In the faint light cast by his iron lantern’s flame, he looked menacing by any man’s standard.

He flinched when I stepped into his lantern’s light.

The ravenous shadows of the raven’s mantle had taken on different shapes for Griffon and I, back when we first consumed and internalized the Rein-Holder’s starlight marrow. Griffon had chosen to wear the rags carelessly around his waist like he did his own Rosy Dawn attire, and so as a raven his midnight cloth pooled around his feet and merged with the shadows of the night. It made it seem as if he was waist-deep in shadow wherever he went - like he had come from Tartarus itself, and a portion of him still resided there.

Though it hadn’t been a conscious decision at the time, I’d donned my mantle like a legate’s cloak - draped over one shoulder, bisecting my body with shade. On the second night of our hunting, Griffon had laughingly remarked that I looked like I was peering out from around a corner, no matter where I happened to be. Both of us had covered our faces with shrouds, obscuring our easiest identifying features.

That was before we had our second taste of madness. Now, the raven’s mantle was changed. The man on guard was my senior in cultivation, yet he took three steps back as I stalked further into his light before finally overcoming his unease. He clenched his empty fist and set his feet, standing up straight while I closed the remaining distance.

“Stop,” he commanded. I took two more steps. “Stop.”

His pneuma rose and his influence clenched into a white-knuckled fist. I stopped just inside of his reach. He was an imposing figure, nearly as tall as me and more heavily muscled. It didn’t mean much.

Before, the raven’s mantle of midnight cloth had appeared to an untrained eye as if it was made of pure liquid shadow. The raven’s ability to store and retrieve items from our actual shadows had lent itself to that illusion. That was all that it had been, however. An illusion.

It was an illusion of a different kind, now.

I reached into the liquid shadow of my raven mantle. The guard tensed, ready to lash out. The attack never came.

The grizzled night guard stared in bafflement at the olive branch I had pulled from my cloak and held out to him. The entire limb was made of ivory.

“What is this?” he asked, looking up at the shadowed void of my veil. “Why are you here?”

“A peace offering,” I replied. “I’ve come to speak to Aleuas.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

I waited patiently. In the distance, an eagle’s cry echoed alongside the Storm Crown’s thunder.

The man on guard grimaced and reached out to take the ivory olive branch. “Fine. Peace. I’ll send word to the main estate-”

His hand slipped through the branch like it wasn’t there at all. I stepped past him, and when he reached out instinctively to grab my shoulder, his hand moved through the raven’s mantle like it wasn’t there either.

“No need,” I told him. From the moment I’d stepped into his lantern light, I’d tasted the ash of burnt chestnut wood in the air. “He already knows.”

I stalked into the shadows of the Hurricane Hierophant’s domain and vanished.

S

“You must be Solus.”

“I must,” I echoed. “By what measure must I be anyone?”

Aleuas scoffed behind his viridian curtain. “By mine. You may be nobody out there, but while you’re here in my domain you are whatever I deem you to be.”

The marble floors of the Hierophant’s estate were cool beneath my bare feet. The private bedroom of the Tyrant’s hurricane domain was a clear contrast to Bakkhos’ own subterranean quarters. Bakkhos’ private rooms had been impressive in their own way, carved as they were out of the depths of Kaukoso Mons, but they hadn’t been nearly as opulent as the courtyard he’d built to house his oracles.

Aleuas’ bedroom was far more grand, covered floor to ceiling in fine windchimes of every shape, size, and material. Precious statuary abounded on every shelf and table space, and silken finery worth more than an average citizen’s entire estate hung negligently over the backs of chairs and lounging couches. There was an artful chaos to it all, reminiscent of the meditative mess that Socrates had made of Bakkhos’ room for one of my lessons. The statement was clear - what the average man, even the average cultivator, might hand down to their children and grandchildren as a priceless relic, the Tyrant could discard upon the floor without a moment of regret.

It was a powerful statement. And it was an illusion, as much as my olive branch of ivory was.

Bakkhos’ private quarters were simply furnished by comparison, because he had an entire mountain and city of wonders to act as his display. Damon Aetos’ office was nearly bare, because there was no one west of the Ionian that he felt he had to impress. In the end, the Hurricane Hierophant’s statement of his standing was as thin as the viridian curtain that separated his side of the room from view.

He could still kill me with a thought, of course.

“So I am,” I conceded. I pulled another ivory olive branch from my cloak and offered it to the silhouette of Aleuas behind the curtain. “Your son-in-law said you wanted to thank me in person.” Aleuas barked a laugh, rattling the chimes throughout the room.

“The sheer audacity. That’s four times you’ve insulted me, now.”

“Four?”

Behind the viridian curtain, the Hierophant raised a finger. “First you ignored my graceful invitation, extended from the hands of my own adopted heir, like I was some barking dog beneath your notice.” A second finger rose. “Next you took from me. Sank your teeth into my influence, consumed my strength, in the moment when my need for it was greatest.”

The curtain whipped and fluttered along with the wind chimes, the Tyrant’s ire rising steadily. The nature of his tyrannic pressure was similar to Damon Aetos’ judgment, but the quality of it differed. It was far more furious, and less finely controlled. It wasn’t enough to send me to my knees. Not yet.

“You took from me again.” A third finger. “Stole my own heir out from under me, stole my daughter’s groom-to-be. Stole my hero.”

I had thought long and hard about my approach to this conversation, while we waited tensely on the Eos for Sorea to return with Anastasia. I had spent the trek back to Olympia refining that approach, cementing it in my mind’s eye. If things went the way I intended them to, I would leave this opulent chamber with an ally to match against the First Son to Burn.

Otherwise, I would die.

“Fourth and finally,” Aleuas intoned, the threat of death in howling wind. “Having done all of that, you come to me now with a shrouded face and ask me to thank you for the privilege.”

I placed a foot against the back of a plush leather lounge and kicked it aside, sitting down in the now empty space on the floor. The Tyrant’s pressure slammed down onto my shoulders. It was more of the same.

“Is my furniture not to your liking, scavenger?” he asked me mildly.

“It wouldn’t carry my weight,” I answered, crossing my legs and settling my elbows on my knees.

“So you cast it aside and make a mess of my domain?”

My face was covered, so I made a show of twisting my head around to regard the hurricane suite’s controlled chaos.

“My mistake,” I said at length, and held the ivory olive branch out again. “I apologize - four times for before, and a fifth for kicking your couch. I’ve come to bargain.”

“To bargain. Tell me, then, boy. What could a raven possibly hope to offer this king?”

We stared at one another, each of us behind a veil.

“Your son,” I told him.

After a long and heavy silence, during which not a single wind chime stirred, Aleuas reached out with a hand of focused wind for my offering of peace. Of course, it was the same branch that I had offered the man at the estate’s outpost - an ivory deception. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t something that mortal hands could grasp.

The Tyrant in his domain plucked it from my hand and carried it back through the viridian curtain on a current of wind. His silhouette twirled it between his fingers.

“Speak,” he commanded me.

Now came the difficult part.

1.101

The Young Griffon

Sorea returned before the sun fell, wheeling above the coastline off our starboard side. The virtuous beast shrieked once to make sure he had our attention and then dipped, diving back over the seaside hills and vanishing from our sight.

“Stop,” Sol commanded, and every oar froze. Scythas’ favorable winds went out of the Eos’ sail like a hitching of breath. Our humble sea dogs awaited their orders with grim resolve. “We’re getting off here.”

“We can’t leave the ship!” one of the men protested.

“Of course not,” I agreed. Several ragged sailors twisted and swiveled on their benches to regard me, opposite the ship from Sol. Beneath my healing hands, the Gadfly’s chest rose and fell - shallow, and slow. “We’re getting off here. The ten of you are sailing this beautiful vessel to kinder waters.”

“But, žibùtė-“

“We can’t-“

“Enough of barking dogs.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have a hand to spare towards waving them off. The old philosopher’s body was a nightmare mess of burns and blackened flesh. The Oracle’s daughter had brought honey from beyond the border of life and death, but its chthonic nature did not make it all-healing. We applied it anyway, and since then I had focused on doing what I could with what Anastasia had taught me.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly. My eyes narrowed, looking but not focusing at what was in front of me, while I traced my pneuma’s path through the old man’s mangled body.

“Sail to another city,” Sol said, taking back their attention as he forced himself to his feet. “North or south. It doesn’t matter, so long as you aren’t here.” The ship dipped and listed to the side at the shifting of his weight.

For as long as I had known the Roman, he had lived his life as if with a yoke across his shoulders. That demeanor hadn’t changed when he shed his slave chains. It was a portion of what had convinced our companions of his ‘high’ standing. And now, it was as much literal as it was metaphorical. When he stood, the ship moved as if a far greater weight had shifted in its place, because a far greater weight had. The Roman’s shoulders tensed, and the muscles up and down his body flexed with the effort. Rising against a pressure that sought to press him down.

“Sir,” one of the men spoke furtively. He had an odd accent, Anatolian maybe. “What if you need a ship again? If your need is urgent, surely we’d be better suited pulling her ashore here?”

“No.” Sol’s voice was flat. Not dangerous, but with a promise of danger should he be disobeyed. Across the deck, behind me, Atlas rose to his feet to match his rider. The black stallion loomed over the men. “If our need is urgent, it means we’ve been found. You’ll be wiped out in an instant.”

“We can hide her in plain sight,” another sea dog suggested, with light brown hair sheared in rough patches from his skull and cheeks, leaving a bristling beard and mustache to grow freely. “Tear down her sails and bring her in at night.”

“I know a crone at the docks ‘makes paint,” another dog entreated the Roman. “We’ll give her a fresh coat, make her look brand new. We’ll park her in one of the gorgon’s breakers, no one’ll be the wiser-“

“Dozens of people saw us board this ship just last week,” Scythas said flatly. The sea dogs shared looks of a particular kind.

“Honored Hero,” one spoke, with careful respect. “Cultivators and fishmongers… they live in different worlds-“

Scythas cut him off. “If a Tyrant is asking, they will remember. They will talk. And you will be found.”

“If we-“

“It doesn’t matter how well you disguise the ship,” Sol said, shaking his head and turning to the rail. He lifted a foot with some effort and braced it on the rail. The wood groaned. “Sorea will find you if we need you. If he does, follow him. He’ll lead you back to us.” His words brooked no further argument. His tone dared any man to defy his judgement.

“What if the bird’s not fast enough? What if it’s dead, and the Tyrant finds you?” The mongrel pirate boy glared up at Sol. In Kabhur’s absence, he had taken up one of the oars as best he could. His face was nearly as red as his hair. “How will we know?”

“If our need is that urgent, it’s better you don’t know,” the Roman said frankly. “If Polyzalus finds us, he’ll burn the entire dock city to cinders - all of you included. Even the best ship is only wood and cloth in the end.”

The Eos dipped precariously as Sol stepped up onto the rail, the figurehead woman nearly kissing the surface of the waves, and then rocked back up as he stepped off into the sea. The sound of his impact was deeper than it should have been, like someone had dropped a boulder instead of a man off the side of the deck. Scythas followed close behind him, vaulting the rail and slipping soundlessly into the sea.

“I’ll bring him,” I informed the daughter of the Oracle, still hovering over the Gadfly. Her scarlet eyes flickered, along with her heart, but she nodded and dove over the side as well.

Lifting the Gadfly gently with the hands of my intent, I looked over our sea dogs. They were conflicted, I could tell. Half a step from anguish.

“Arrogant dogs,” I scoffed. A few of them flinched. The pirate child clenched his fists, glaring mutinously. “We’ll be fine without you. Consider this your accounts settled, and the last offer you’ll get from either one of us - take your freedom and go. The old man was wise enough to return home the second time we told him. Follow his example. Live.”

I paused at the rail, considering our beasts. Atlas was standing stock still on the deck, eyes riveted on the waves between us and the shore. For a horse, he was rather expressive. I could see his mood getting darker by the second. His chest expanded and contracted feverishly, nostrils flaring and shooting steam.

“Drop the horses off by Krokos,” I decided. “They’ll find their way from there.” Then I stepped over the rail and into the sea with the Gadfly in tow.

I swam to shore swiftly, the Gadfly’s unconscious body bobbing on a raft of pankration hands behind me lest the salt water further irritate his burns. Somehow, I wasn’t the last one to reach the beach. Scythas was pacing the sands while Selene sat with her knees tucked up to her chest, both of them watching the waves between us and the distant Eos with mounting concern.

Just as Scythas seemed ready to go diving back in after him, the man in question came trudging out of the waves.

Walking. He was too heavy to swim.

Sol stalked past the Gadfly and I, the sunset rays above casting his shadow briefly across mine. I frowned faintly.

“Surely the legions taught you how to swim,” I said after a beat. He gave me an ugly look and carried on.

Sorea called out to us. Over the hills, but close enough.

“Alright.” Sol ran a hand through sea-soaked black hair, slicking it back. “Let’s fix this.”

§

As an initiate of the Rosy Dawn, I had seen more than my fair share of heinous burns - and suffered them just the same. I knew the scouring agony as well as I knew my name, and I had seen men die despite the best efforts of seasoned physicians because the fire had simply taken too much from them. In the end, some burns healed and others could be mended with ointments and good fortune.

But not burns like these.

We found Anastasia in a shadowed copse of firs, her eyes riveted on the skies above where Sorea was circling. She was whistling softly, an unassuming reply to each of the eagle’s cries, and her cultivator’s sense brushed against mine nearly before I’d noticed her. Her eyes swiveled to us at once, curious and bright burning green.

“Griffon? What’s this-?”

The acid burning waves of her influence brushed over the Gadfly’s body behind me, and her eyes flared in the dark of coming dusk. A moment later, she was behind me.

“Easy!” Scythas hissed, casting around with every sense available to him. We were far enough from the city of Olympia that I couldn’t sense anything of it, but that didn’t necessarily mean no one there could sense us. A Tyrant’s reach was long. In most cases, anyway.

“This is Socrates?” Anastasia asked. The damage was severe enough that it warranted question. I nodded, and she joined her hands to the mending effort. Immediately, she winced. “I heard the rumors, but this…”

I blinked, looking up from my work. “Rumors?”

“Can you heal him?” Scythas asked the Caustic Queen, tense but hopeful.

“If it were anyone else, I’d say it was impossible,” she said, kneeling in the dirt and pulling from a fold in her onyx silks the tools of her trade. Delicate surgical knives, one after another, that she handed off to my pankration hands with careful deliberation. “Burns like these should have killed him on the spot. But if the rumors are true, and it seems like they are, then he’s survived them for days. If it’s the Gadfly… perhaps.”

“What rumors?” I asked her again. Anastasia frowned.

“These rumors.” She nodded down at the charred old man, passing my healing hands the last of her surgical blades and laying her palms over his heart and his forehead respectively. “Rumors that the Tyrant Polyzalus and the Gadfly had a spat, and nearly burnt down the Scarlet City’s portion of the Raging Heaven estates in the process.”

“How could this have been a mere rumor?” I pressed, with growing suspicion. “How is the entire city not in flames?”

Anastasia glanced up at me with hooded eyes, distant in their calculations. “Why would it be?”

I felt the wrath build in the beating of my heart.

The old man was a liar.

“How do we fix this?” I asked my mentor in mending, forcing my fury aside. “He lacks the healthy skin for a graft, and the damage is too severe for anything else. Enlighten this lowly sophist - if not by balm, and neither by excision, how do we heal this man?”

“For this, excision is the only way,” she said, and drew her own surgical knife carefully through a blacked patch of skin. I watched her intently, and then mirrored the motion with each of the pankration hands she had armed with feather-thin obsidian blades. “A donation will be required.”

A comment about Scythas’ skin being far too smooth for the Gadfly’s weathered body was on the tip of my tongue before I consciously realized it. I swallowed it down. The taste of it was sickening.

“If I must,” I said instead. But the Heroine only sighed and shook her head.

Anastasia reached back into the fold in logic within her onyx attire, and spoke a solemn oath.

“First, do no harm.”

And from that paradox logic, she pulled a corpse out of her robes.

Scythas cursed and lurched away from the body. I stared down at it. A man, shriveled and hunched in death - at a glance, old enough to be the Gadfly’s same age, though cultivation made it so he could have been centuries older or younger for all my eyes knew. I laid a hand of my own flesh and blood over his heart, coaxing my pneuma through the corpse. Seventy-eight years old.

I found the cause of death soon after. A lack of breath - the source, hemlock poisoning.

“Are you ready to learn?” Anastasia asked me, intent in a mountain cat’s way. Ready to fight.

All the world a tarnished iron.

“Always,” I said, and turned my blades upon the corpse.

§

The work was done when the Gadfly finally came to. It was night, and the stars were bright above the forest of firs. It was pleasantly cool, even by a mortal’s standards. A far cry from the frigid chill of northern Thracia.

Socrates returned to the world of the living reluctantly. As soon as his eyes cracked open, he scowled and sat up.

“Don’t,” Anastasia ordered, laying both hands carefully on his bandaged shoulders. The old philosopher grunted and shrugged her off like she was the gadfly instead of him.

“I’m fine, girl.” He rolled his shoulders, and flexed his fingers and toes, grimacing as he observed our work. Our robes were stained by his blood and the streaks of char his blackened flesh had left behind. The old man, by contrast, was wrapped up nearly head to toe in linens. Like an Egyptian corpse.

Socrates peeled back one of the bandages, ignoring Anastasia’s exasperation. His eyes narrowed.

“Whose skin is this?”

“Yours, now,” Scythas answered, peering down at us from the tallest tree in the grove. In the night, his eyes looked like a pair of distant planets.

The Gadfly sneered and dug a finger into the gastro thread we’d used to sew the grafted skin in place. He made to pry it out.

I struck him with the truth of my lived experience-

A Titan is to an Olympian what an Olympian is to a Man.

The oldest generation takes the youngest generation in their hands. You are torn apart, limb by limb, before you speak your first word. You scream in a voice so loud that their ears bleed and the heavens shake in their frame, but it is not enough to rouse your murdered mother. It is not enough to stir The Mother's wrathful heart.

The Titans consume you one limb at a time. They bite into your organs and split them like overripe fruit. They crack your bones open and suck out the marrow therein. They crush to pulp the lungs in your chest to silence your wailing.

-and then I punched him in the mouth.

Socrates’ back hit the dirt. I had only a split second to savor the stinging pain in my knuckles before the thousand-thousand whispering truths of his rhetoric surged and he lashed out at me with a donkey kick.

I slammed through the trunks of four separate firs and toppled every one of them before my momentum bled enough for the fifth one to catch my weight. Linen-wrapped legs appeared in my hazy vision, a raw red hand fisting through my hair. The Gadfly pulled me up to eye level, as irritated as he ever was. Even in the haze of my double vision, I could see the blood from his split lip. I smirked faintly.

“What was that?” the Gadfly demanded furiously, acting for all the world like he hadn’t been on death’s door just a few hours ago.

“If I attack you with reason you’ll just brush me off, because reason is your trade,” I explained, kneading with pankration hands at the spot on my hip where he’d kicked me. The bone was cracked but not broken. “But if I inundate you with mania, even the great Socrates must take a moment to separate himself from the madness. At least until you’ve built up a tolerance to it - like a cup of wine. Isn’t that so?”

Bakkhos had peddled in madness. Because of its very nature, it was difficult to picture an ability like that in your mind. The elements were simply in comparison - fire blinded and burnt, and could be made by any mortal man. The wind, while invisible to the eye, could be heard and felt within and without. But what of madness? How could the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven have struck out with madness in the same way that I struck out with the hands of my violent intent? How could he have scoured his enemies with madness the same way I did with flame?

It was exceedingly difficult to intuit.

But I was beginning to understand.

“You’re a pest,” the Scholar rendered judgement upon me.

“And you’re a liar,” I responded in kind.

“I’m a liar?”

“‘Polyzalus has left his domain. Nowhere in Olympia is safe.’” I repeated his delirious words from before, mocking him even as he threw me to the ground. I caught myself with pankration hands and rose. “You made us think he was on the warpath. You made us think he was coming for us. You lied.”

“He did leave his domain, when the girl’s statue first broke apart. He came after me, and he put me through my paces. And I had little choice but to suffer it, because in my old age I was foolish enough to assure him his daughter wouldn’t come to harm with the two of you around her. Every word I said was true enough. None of it was a lie.”

The Gadfly crossed his bandaged arms over his bandaged chest and sneered at me.

“Is that sort of truth not good enough for you, boy?”

These hands of mine had made him whole. They could take him apart again just as well.

“You’re going to pull the grafts out of your body if you don’t rest,” Anastasia warned the philosopher, though she maintained a safe distance from him as she paced through the wreckage left in my passing to kneel beside me. Searing heat wound through my body, coalescing in my hip where the Gadfly had struck me. Distantly, as if an afterthought, she said to me, “You dug out new channels while you were gone.”

I traced the paths left behind by the starlight marrow months ago and realized she was right. They had changed again. They were further linked, now, every strand connected. A more refined network.

A wheel.

“I stretched the truth, I’ll give you that much,” the Gadfly admitted, settling into a cross-legged seating position across from me and rubbing irritably at the bandages on his thighs. He didn’t tear them off, though. “But tell me this - has the girl gone running back to her father?”

“She has,” Scythas answered, a whisper that all of us heard despite the fact that he was still up in his distant tree.

“Then all is well. The girl is stubborn and foolish, and stronger than she has any right to be thanks to the meddling of old men, but she’s still a girl. My wounds frightened her, and the thought of what her father would do to any of you if he got his hands on you frightened her more. She’d have dug her heels into the earth and fought me every step of the way if I tried to drag her back to her father the honest way, but like this, she’ll return to him herself.”

“You convinced Old ‘Zalus to wait,” I said, knowing in my gut that it was true. “He burnt you, but he didn’t kill you. And he didn’t leave the mountain. Just his room.”

Socrates shrugged. “Even that much was a torment for him. He hates to leave his wife unattended.”

“You knew we wouldn’t turn the ship around,” I continued.

“I hoped you would.”

I scoffed. “You played us.”

“Sometimes, even if a child knows that a thing is just and correct, they won’t do it unless they believe it was their idea to do it first.”

The Gadfly had led us to believe that all of Olympia was a danger above any other, that a wrathful Tyrant could be hiding behind every corner. He had made us believe that none of us were safe from Polyzalus - and by association, none of the people we had associated with up until now in the city of Olympia. Anyone that we had spoken to that could feasibly be used to find us.

And in so doing, he had made a mistake.

“You’ve erred, wise man.”

“Is that so?” the Gadfly waved a hand. “Enlighten me.”

“You’ve made an assumption that, in fairness, greater men than you have made. But just because you’re in esteemed company doesn’t make you any less wrong.”

“And what assumption is that?”

I leaned forward.

“You assumed that I was the mad one of the two of us.”

I watched his brow furrow, his lips pull down into a frown. To his credit, it was only a brief moment of confusion that preceded realization.

The Scholar rose abruptly to his feet.

“Where is the boy?”

I clapped with hands of flesh and blood, and when that wasn’t enough I clapped with thirty more of my intent.

“You played us like a lyre, old man,” I praised him, while understanding slowly dawned on Anastasia’s face. She had been wondering about Sol’s absence, but she hadn’t taken the further step to ask about it until now. “You put on such a show, put such a horrifying image of a mourning father’s wrath in our heads, we couldn’t help but believe you. Selene was so distraught at the idea of her father doing to another innocent what he had done to you that she went straight home.”

The Gadfly’s pneuma rose. I smiled mercilessly in the face of his panic and his rage, returning it with my own. The waves of our influence slammed together and roared like tidal waves.

“Sol was mad enough to blame himself for allowing the girl to sneak aboard our ship in the first place,” I continued, my smile shifting with every word. Until, in the end, it was nothing but a pleasant snarl. “He took your death upon his shoulders. And so, to avoid any more casualties, he went with her. To bargain.”

“With Polyzalus?” Socrates thundered, shaking the trees.

“No,” the wind replied. Above us, Scythas gazed grimly in the direction of the distant Half-Step City. “With Aleuas.”

A Tyrant for a Tyrant.

1.100 [Nikolas Aetos]

The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Don’t come back. Not until you’ve found something worth sharing - a wife, companions. Your passion.

Niko’s companions had harbored their fair share of doubts and misgivings leading up to the wedding, his wife included among them. They had readied themselves for a fight, gathered up any material advantage they could get their hands on, steeled their hearts and grit their teeth as the Eos braved the Ionian Sea again for the first time in years. And why not? Even Niko had harbored his concerns - and the Scarlet City had treated him well.

There was just something about sailing into the setting sun, further west than any civilized Greek cared to go, and knowing that Damon Aetos was waiting for you on that distant shore. Mortal or Heroic, the prospect unsettled. But Niko was blessed in more ways than one, and the friends he’d made were true. They followed him in spite of their misgivings, and Iphys acquiesced to his destination wedding in the end.

When all was said and done, the surprise wasn’t that things had ended in disaster. It was how they’d fallen apart.

And because of whom.

§

In some ways, it was easier to take the measure of a man by observing the world in his absence.

§

The days passed agonizingly slow. The Olympic Games were most of half a year away when Niko and Iphys exchanged their marital rings. Now, there were hardly more than three.

Some days it was like he had never left. The sheets on his bed were the same, the gymnasium was just as rowdy as he remembered it, and the baths were somehow still occupied by the same old man no matter what time of day or night it happened to be. Their evening meals tasted just how he remembered them. He could still name almost every slave and mystiko in the estates. He memorized the new arrivals in the first week.

But other days, it was glaringly apparent that the Rosy Dawn that Lio had left was not the same Rosy Dawn that Niko remembered.

“Niko!”

Thaum heaved an exasperated sigh, but he sheathed his borrowed sword obligingly and stepped back from their afternoon discourse. One of the larger members of their group, and by far the most restless, the fourth rank Hero had taken to the  blade in an effort to pass the time. It wasn’t his preferred weapon, which made it fair to challenge anyone and everyone that wore the Rosy Dawn’s attire. According to him, anyway.

Niko inclined his head and extended his own blade in mock salute. The burly Hero waved him off. “Go on, then. I’ll see if anyone is up for a round in the gym.”

“Easy,” Niko chided him. “The only people on your level here are us and my aunts and uncles. You’ll scare everyone off if you keep it up.”

“I don’t want to hear that from you,” Thaum said, looking pointedly over Niko‘s shoulder at the boy sprinting their way.

Myron still had bruises.

“Cousin,” Niko greeted the boy as he skidded across the frozen surface of a river that had been flowing freely only a couple hours ago.

“Is now a good time?” the ten year old asked between panting breaths, his hands on his knees. Knowing him, he had sprinted all the way down the eastern mountain range to get there. Blue eyes darted furtively to Thaum’s retreating back.

Niko smiled and ruffled his cousin’s hair. “I always have time for my cute little cousins.” Myron huffed and smacked his hand away.

“I’m not cute,” he denied cutely. He stood up straight and puffed out his chest. At his tallest, the crown of his head could just barely brush the underside of Niko‘s chest. A difference of five or six hands.

“You’re adorable,” Niko said frankly. His cousin scowled. “If your mother wasn’t so fierce, I’d worry for your purity around the cult’s senior sisters. I bet they offer to trade pointers with you day and night.”

“How did you-?” Myron shook his head, dashing the tangent from the air. A seriousness overtook him, entirely out of place on his cherubic face. “Enough. I’m ready for the next lesson.”

Niko sighed and sat down on the surface of the frozen lake. His youngest cousin mirrored him, legs crossed and back straight.

“You couldn’t have possibly mastered it that quick,” he said, though he had learned in the past few months not to doubt the absurd things his cousins told him. “It took me months to form the first one. Don’t tell me you’ve been staying up through the night again.”

“Okay. I won’t tell you.”

“Cheeky little brat. Show me, then.”

Myron nodded sharply and closed his eyes, a portion of his body relaxing while his pneuma rose in a smooth sublimation.

It was a warm afternoon, and the early signs of spring were in the air. Niko had forgone the scarlet silks of the Rosy Dawn’s Young Aristocrat and instead ventured out in the bronze armor and leathers that had become far more familiar to him in his years spent abroad. A scarlet scarf was the least of what he could get away with to mark his status, and so it was all that he wore. Myron, for his part, wore the white silks and intricate scarlet trimming of a senior member of the cult, though they were ragged and rumpled. Clearly past due for a cleaning.

Niko wondered how long it had been since his cousin had taken a bath. For that matter, he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten or spoken to his parents. The last time he had slept.

The ten year old inhaled a slow, deep breath, and held it. And held it. Then he opened his eyes, and without exhaling that first breath, he took in a second one.

An impossible feat. The lungs could only take in so much air at a time, after all. But in this case, that first breath hadn’t stopped at the lungs.

Niko‘s cousin hadn’t known what the hunting bird’s breath was only a few short weeks ago. And already he had formed a pneumatic chamber within his body.

“How long can you hold it for?” he asked, leaning forward.

“As long as I want.”

“You don’t have to exaggerate, cousin,” he told the boy, rapping his knuckles against his forehead. “It’s impressive enough that you managed it at all. Being able to speak while you maintain it is the next step and you’ve already conquered that too. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Just be honest with me.”

“I am being honest,” Myron insisted.

“Is that so?” Well, he supposed he hadn’t been much better at that age. Young and eager to please, even more eager to prove himself. It wouldn’t hurt to humor him. “Enlighten this lowly sophist, then. Why didn’t you maintain it on your way here?”

The hunting bird’s breath was a manipulation of pneuma in its most primal, basic state; it was a breathing technique that allowed a cultivator to store their breath‘s vital essence in a chamber within their body like an eagle. By hollowing out portions of their body, they could use that extra space to store an extra breath, or two, or three, and so on.

Each breath was fuel for an application of virtue. Each breath was vitality in its purest form. If a cultivator with no pneumatic chambers could cast a lance of fire and light from their palm with the vitality of a single breath, then a cultivator with eight chambers could cast nine lances of fire and light in the same brief moment - one from the lungs as the first cultivator had, and one from every pneumatic chamber simultaneously.

The hunting bird’s breath was a breathing technique that had been in the Aetos family for as long as they’d had their name. Every scarlet son to bear the eagle’s name had learned it from their father, who had learned it from his father, who in turn had learned it from his father, all in an unbroken chain spanning back to the first and oldest ancestor.

Except. Somehow, where Niko had been given this ancestral birthright, his cousins had been denied it. Somehow, Myron had never heard of the hunting bird’s breath before Niko had mentioned it in passing weeks ago. Despite the fact that Myron‘s father, Niko’s Uncle Stavros, had been the one to hand it down to him.

It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t.

“It isn’t enough to maintain the chamber while at rest,” he explained for his cousin’s benefit, because although it was a fundamental aspect of the breathing technique, the boy apparently had no one but Niko willing to inform him of it. “You have to be able to control it under duress. The same way you learned to control your breathing in the octagon, or on a marathon run - only now you have to learn how to do it twice. Like you have another set of lungs. When you sleep, when you run, when you speak. If you don’t maintain it, it will collapse. And the moment when you’ll need it, without fail, will be the moment that it’s the hardest to maintain it - and if you lose your grip in a fight, you’ll be fortunate if you live to regret it.”

The hunting bird’s breath was one of the most versatile pneumatic techniques in the world. It was also one of the most difficult to maintain. Years ago, Uncle Stavros had informed him in a voice of fondly remembered suffering that it had taken him almost a year to fully internalize his first pneumatic chamber. It had taken Niko months to fully master his first, and every step along the way had been an infuriating struggle.

So why did his littlest cousin look so smug?

“I know all that already.” Myron exhaled, his pneuma flowing out in a wave as his lungs emptied. He exhaled a second time, draining his pneumatic chamber as well.

“That’s why I didn’t come looking for you until I could maintain two.”

And he exhaled a third time without inhaling, pneuma pouring out of a second internal chamber.

Niko stared.

“I wanted to make sure I had the trick of it, so I went to the gymnasium first,” his youngest cousin explained, pride overtaking Myron’s usual somber seriousness as he flexed a bicep and smacked it. “I kept one chamber filled in reserve, and waited until the end of my last fight to drain the other one.”

It was a warm spring day and yet they were sitting on the surface of a frozen river. Somehow, that was only the second most absurd thing about the conversation.

“Myron,” Niko said faintly, raising one hand and cradling his head in the other. “You promise me you’ve never used this technique before?”

The boy tilted his head, confused. “Why would I lie?”

Right.

Two chambers in less than a month. Two chambers hollowed out of his body by his own intent. Two channels carved through his bones to connect the chambers to his lungs. The pain he had to have endured, pain that his father had spread out over the course of a year - pain that Niko himself had diluted over the course of months and still remembered the bite of. He had condensed that pain into scant weeks, and he had done it twice.

Five years ago, his youngest cousin hadn’t even awoken to his place in the world. He wasn’t even a cultivator. Now here he was. At the eighth rank of the Civic realm, and growing faster than a weed.

“How many times did you lose your grip on it in the gymnasium?” he asked, because no matter how miraculous the boy was, no one was perfect.

“Maybe a dozen,” Myron answered readily. “The first time was bad. I had to skip dinner because I couldn’t stop coughing blood and I knew mom would have my head if she saw it. The second time was worse, but the rest after that were only partial slips.”

“Twice,” Niko echoed. In the end, he couldn’t even be mad. It was his fault for not keeping a closer eye on his cousin. Still. “Why didn’t you come to me after the first slip? Why didn’t you come to me after the second?”

Myron looked utterly confused.

“Why would I? I knew what I had to do.”

He was too young to be this way.

“You hurt yourself,” Niko pointed out. “At the very least, you could have told me that. We could have gone over the technique again. I could have helped you. If I had known you were already that far along, I would have told you to slow down. This process is easier if you give your body time to adjust to it.”

“Why would I want it to be easy?” Myron asked.

Ah.

“Right or wrong, fast or slow, easy or difficult.” The boy ticked off a finger for each category. “If I can do it right, and I can do it fast, why should anything else matter?”

“You carved away pieces of your body to make those chambers,” Niko said quietly, as if the boy didn’t already know. He laid a hand on his cousin’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Wasn’t it painful?”

“It was.” Matter of fact, like he was observing the weather.

“Cultivation doesn’t have to be painful, cousin,” Niko informed him kindly. Only ten years old. Not a hint of stubble on his chin. He was too young to be treating his body like a practice blade. “We temper our bodies, yes, but gradually.

“A scarlet son has to be able to withstand incredible heat to call upon our foundational virtue - as I am now, I can stand in the center of a bonfire and not shed a drop of sweat. But I reached that level of resistance over time. I didn’t go plunging into an open flame on my very first day.”

“Lio did.”

It had been five years since Niko left the Scarlet City. In those five years, Lio Aetos had changed. It was only in his absence that Niko was beginning to understand just how severely. In the marks that he had left behind.

“So what’s next?” Myron pressed.

Lio had changed. And he had changed their cousins just the same.

1.99

The Son of Rome

There and back again in just under two weeks. All told, it was one of the faster expeditions I’d been a part of.

It had taken us three days to sail around the southern tip of the Peloponnesian landmass where Olympia resided, and north up the full length of the Aegean Sea to the unmarked lands of Thracia. It had taken us four more days and four more nights of horseback riding and chthonic wandering to find our infernal drink and return to the Eos with golden cup in hand. We’d made good time sailing back thus far, despite the added weight of our cargo and the brief complication of Griffon breaking all the oars. By the dawn of our third day back at sea, the coast was on the ship’s starboard side once more.

Our last and maddest night in the land of indefinite boundaries had cut the four of us deeply, but time and the steady lapping of the waves had worn the edge of our mania away as surely as a seaside cliff. By the second night, I was able to sleep.

As the rosy dawn broke over our third morning back at sea, Selene revealed to us that Griffon wasn’t the only one on board with a sweet singing voice.

“Whenever Bakkhos comes, I lay my cares to rest,” she sang, swinging her legs idly over the deep blue waves of the Ionian. She spoke with a cultivator’s universal tongue, conveying the meaning of the words to every sailor’s ear. The men of the Eos belted out the following verse with bawdy enthusiasm.

“Bring me the cup, boy! Oh, bring me the cup!”

“I dream I’m rich as Croesus, and it makes me want to sing.” If Griffon’s voice was wine-dark deep and rolling smoke, then Selene’s was light like honeycombs and falling snow. More than charming enough to put a smile on every sailor’s face.

“Bring me the cup, boy! I said bring me that cup!”

Griffon and Scythas sat beside the horses at the rear edge of the deck, speaking more cordially than I had ever seen them before. It likely helped that half the Hero’s attention was committed to the mare, Kronia. I’d noticed back when he was buying the beasts that Scythas had an eye for horses born of passion.

That passion was on full display now, the Hero’s admiration for the white-haired beast of virtue clear to see. Kronia hadn’t allowed him to touch her at first, perhaps remembering what had happened to the last two horses he’d ridden, but Griffon had convinced her with some cajoling words and a vigorous massage with thirty formless hands. They both poked and prodded at the mare while they discussed the finer mechanics of beast cultivation, searching for changes in her body that had come from the consumption of a higher power.

Scythas hadn’t even bothered with Atlas. It was likely for the best.

“Ivy-garlanded I lie, but through my heart I walk the world.”

“Bring me the cup, boy! Boy, bring me the cup!”

For my part, I had taken to passing the time in my usual way.

Dice carved from a sea bream’s bones clattered and rolled across the deck. Eight dice in all, every one an octahedron with various number carved into each of their eight faces. They weren’t the prettiest, but I’d been working with substandard materials from the start.

And they looked pretty enough when they landed with the numbers I desired.

“I win!” a wiry pirate boy with vibrant red hair declared gleefully, already groping for the small pile of berries on the deck between us.

My hand came down, covering the mound of fruit before he could snatch it away. The boy’s grin immediately turned to a scowl. He scrabbled at my fingers, heaved with all his strength at my hand, but no matter what he did he could not lift my hand from the pile.

“Cheater!” he accused me. “You said the highest number gets the prize!”

“I did.”

“And I won!”

“Did you?”

The pirate child looked at me like I was simple. “Thirty-one beats thirty.”

“It does,” I agreed. “But thirty beats twenty-nine.”

“Wha-?”

I counted off the values of his dice, adding them as I went. “Five, seven, eight, sixteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-nine.”

“Thirty-one!” the boy protested, jabbing a grimy finger at the last of the bone dice. “That’s a six! The I goes after the-” He blinked, abruptly realizing his mistake.

“The I goes before the V,” I corrected him, tapping the die in question. “If you look at it so that the I comes after, the V will be upside down. It’s a four, not a six. You lose.”

The boy slumped, his forehead thumping against the deck.

“I’m hungry,” he said pitifully. I hummed.

“Unfortunate.” I popped a raspberry into my mouth and savored its tang. The little pirate spat an oath and pounded his fists against the planks.

“Get it ready and I’ll drink: bring me the cup, boy!” Selene cheered, and the oarsmen brought the song home.

“Bring me the cup, boy! Now bring me that cup!”

§

It was only a brief reprieve. We distracted ourselves with pleasant things, got to know the men that had kept the Eos safe in our absence and amused ourselves with dice and fishing and idle talk. But though the passing days had dulled its edge, we still felt the echoes of that night spent in the Orphic House. It haunted each of us in its own way.

Griffon had insisted at the beginning of this Thracian venture that we keep going until the ingredients were gathered, but that had been before we’d seen for ourselves what one reagent alone required. If we had any hope at all of finding more, we’d need a light to guide us at the very least. Or, failing that, an old man’s wisdom.

It came to us unexpectedly - hours before the Eos would have reached Olympia’s southernmost dock.

A welcome cry from above heralded the return of my eagle, Sorea’s grand wingspan blotting out the sunlight briefly as he wheeled overhead. Selene jumped off her seat at the starboard rail and waved excitedly up at the bird, calling out his name.

I held out an arm and the messenger beast landed gracefully on it, curling his talons around my forearm and squeezing just tight enough not to cut through skin. His form of greeting, I supposed. I offered him a berry from my pile.

“I was wondering when you’d make it back. How was your-“

Atlas groaned and rose up, the muscles beneath his dark flank clenching and spasming around the wounds the gatekeepers and I had given him. His golden eyes glared daggers at the bird. After a long beat of silence, unbroken by the sailors that rightfully feared the devastation they could bring down upon a ship, he snorted threateningly. Despite the fact that we were far from the frozen lands of Thracia now, the air still left the charger’s nostrils as steam.

Scythas watched the stallion warily, ready to bolt out from his immediate reach if necessary. Griffon continued to stroke his mare’s head, glancing between the eagle and the stallion with naked curiosity. Selene, for her part, was too busy rummaging through barrels for scraps to feed Sorea to care.

Sorea cocked his head at the grandstanding horse and slowly, with deliberation, lifted his wings. Somehow, I felt like I could almost understand their silent exchange.

Atlas screamed a challenge. The oarsmen nearest to him shouted and scrambled away.

Disgusting, ugly pheasant! Who gave you permission to lay talons on my Roman?

Sorea shrieked his own reply.

Junior, you dare? He was mine long before he was yours!

Atlas dragged a hoof against the deck, carving furrows into the wood.

The little morsel is tempting the Fates. Apologize to this stallion a thousand-thousand times and I’ll consider breaking your neck before I eat you.

Why did I imagine both of them speaking with Griffon’s voice?

Wretched ass, you have much to learn of heaven and earth. Come, let’s exchange discou- ow, fuck!

Griffon flinched and recoiled from Selene’s penumbral spear, stabbed cleanly through his shadow. His shaded silhouette withdrew from mine, and the voices of ‘Sorea’ and ‘Atlas’ abruptly vanished from my mind.

I really should have known better.

Virtuous beasts were a natural phenomena well known to any cultivator, though what was known of them was dangerously vague. It was an issue in many ways similar to the delineation of cultivators - it was easy enough to differentiate the Legate from the Consul, the Consul from the Censor, just as it was to separate Philosophers from Heroes, and Heroes from Tyrants. But though it was the case that Caesar and Antony had reigned as Consuls together for a year’s time, they were far from the same political animal.

We had stories to roughly outline the scope of what a given animal was capable of becoming - tales of the Champion and his beastly labors most prominent among them. But the Nemean Lion was not the rule when it came to a lion with an awakened soul. It was only the standard, just as the Champion himself was the standard for a Heroic cultivator. Not every lion was the Nemean Lion. Not every Hero was the Champion. That variance made them unpredictable. It made them dangerous, in a way a mundane beast was not.

A war elephant was a terrifying sight, but it was a force that could be opposed. Through struggle and through wit, with the knowledge that countless men before us had suffered to accrue, they could be put down. They were terrifying. But they were a known quantity.

A war elephant that had woken its sleeping soul, though? That was an unknown terror. Somehow more primal, in spite of its refinement.

I had seen for myself what a virtuous beast was capable of, more than once in the course of my years. I knew that they were capable of incredible things.

They were still animals.

“Play nice,” I said, exasperated, and flicked the underside of Sorea’s beak mid-shriek. It snapped shut, choking off the beast’s impressive war cry. His talons dug into the flesh of my arm, threatening to draw blood. I didn’t need Griffon narrating in my head to know that he was offended.

Atlas’ lips peeled back from his teeth, and the black charger whinnied mockingly at my messenger bird. I took one of the bone dice I’d been rolling around in my hand and flicked hard enough across the deck and through his open mouth that I heard the wet ping of it striking the back of his throat. The stallion gagged, steam pouring out of his nostrils and from between his teeth as he choked.

The members of the crew watched in mingled horror and relief as the stallion collapsed, throat undulating as he tried and failing to dislodge the bone die from its obstructing place. His legs lashed out, large and strong enough to shatter the ship’s wooden benches and break bone if anyone had been close enough to get hit - Scythas dodged with his usual alacrity and Griffon just laid his head against his mare, where Atlas’ hooves miraculously never struck.

My horse choked one last time and fell still, his massive head hitting the deck with an echoing thump. The redheaded pirate boy inched towards him, reaching out a wary finger to poke the dead animal’s muzzle.

“I wouldn’t,” I warned him. One of the sailors lurched forward and grabbed him by the back of his chiton, tossing the boy back across the deck to safety. “Thank you. Now, you,” I said, shifting my arm so that Sorea was facing me. “What have you got for me?”

For the first time in my life, I saw an eagle grimace.

By the time Sorea was done vomiting, there were five scrolls of rolled papyrus on the deck of the Eos and even my ‘dead’ horse had cracked an eye open to stare in abject disgust at the bird. Selene rubbed the bird’s spine, murmuring soothing words to it.

“You could let us tie them to your legs,” I suggested. “I know you’re strong enough for it.” Sorea snapped his beak at me, close enough to my nose to feel the displacement of air, and then beat his wings and shot up to the top of the ship’s mast where he settled in to sulk.

“I was wondering where the bird went,” Griffon mused. “What has he brought us?”

I had a feeling I already knew, but I cracked each of them open and read the opening lines just to be certain. With each one, the tension in my frame relaxed a bit more. By the fifth, I felt a faint smile on my lips.

“Replies from our friends,” I said, and tossed three of them up into the air. Griffon caught two with pankration hands and the third with palm of flesh and blood. His brow furrowed as he read the first few lines. Abruptly, he unfurled the rest of the scroll and looked at the name signed at the bottom of it. His eyes widened.

“Elissa? Why is she-?”

“I wasn’t just making hidden conversation with Selene while I was writing those letters before,” I explained, shrugging. I unfurled one of the two I’d kept for myself, a written in a fine and flowing Greek script that that Babel shard translated as it hit my eyes. Welcome news from Anastasia, for once. “I was writing Jason and Anastasia anyway, so I thought I’d extend an olive branch to the other three.”

“And they responded.”

“They did,” I agreed. I glanced up from Anastasia’s message, eyeing him. For some reason, the Scarlet Son seemed to be almost at a loss. “Sometimes, a no isn’t really a no. Time and space apart to consider can be a more persuasive argument than any rhetoric. I had a feeling they’d come around in their own time, in their own ways.”

I had seen the truth of it when I’d looked around that table, in the aftermath of the story of the Brothers Aetos. Griffon’s three had been shaken, each for their own reasons, and they had wavered. For that precarious moment, they had balanced on the edge of throwing in with us and withdrawing entirely. They had needed a push, not from me, but from him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been in a proper state of mind to give them one at the time.

But they couldn’t stay balanced on the knife’s edge forever. Left to their own devices, they would fall eventually. On one side or the other. I hadn’t known which side that would be, and I hadn’t known if reaching out through Sorea would push them to our side or away from it, or if it would have any effect at all.

I’d taken a gamble with stakes that weren’t mine to play. A bad habit. But this time, at least, it had paid off.

Slam.

Scythas jumped up in alarm a moment before everyone else, rushing to the port side of the ship and nearly flinging himself over the edge entirely as he lunged to grab whatever had hit us. What he pulled from the waves wasn’t a wayward swordfish or a crocodile far from home. It wasn’t a sea creature at all.

Scythas heaved the Gadfly up over the ship’s rail and onto the deck, scattering salt water and blood across the wood.

I lunged up and briefly saw stars, the wounds from my recent brush with tribulation and the weight on my shoulders nearly buckling my knees. I pushed through it and knelt heavily at the old philosopher’s side while he panted and bled across the deck.

“Socrates?” I hissed, unsure of where to touch him. His body was a mess of blood and blackened flesh. Griffon slid across the deck in a crouch, kneeling at his other side and laying hands of flesh and blood and pankration intent across the old philosopher’s body.

The Gadfly grunted and waved a burnt hand at the former Young Aristocrat. “Off.”

All thirty pankration hands were blasted away as if by Scythas’ gale winds. Griffon sneered. “Old man, I’m trying to mend you.”

“Not yet. Turn this ship around first. Now.”

“What?” Scythas asked, alarmed. “Why?”

“Because all of you except the girl are going to die if you dock it at Olympia.”

“What?” Selene hissed, the scarlet flames behind her eyes flaring up. “Why!? What’s going on-“

Socrates lashed out with an arm nearly as black as coal, long fracturing lines cracking the skin apart, and grabbed Selene by her sunray silks. She yelped as he yanked her down, baring his teeth furiously.

“Because you didn’t listen. Because three days ago you died, and Old Polyzalus came howling for my head. Your father has left his domain, girl. Nowhere in Olympia is safe for these men. Nowhere.”

His eyes were glassy. He had Selene’s face nearly pressed to his, but he wasn’t really looking at her. Could he see her at all? Could he see anything at all?

“How did you find us?” I asked him urgently, as the energy slowly but surely slipped out of him. His grip slackened and fell away, releasing Selene and allowing her to draw back.

“Átta did this to you?” the daughter of the Oracle whispered, horrified.

“Socrates! How did you find us?”

“Followed your bird,” the Scholar muttered. His sun-blinded eyes drifted shut. “Turn the ship around…”

“Socrates? Socrates?” I slapped him in the face, but the old man didn’t respond. “Griffon!”

Thirty pankration hands and two of flesh and blood settled over the old man’s burnt and battered body. Within moments, the Scarlet Son snarled a curse and pulled back.

“This is beyond me. Son of a bitch.”

“Do any of you know anything of medicine? Anyone?” I cast around, but found no salvation among the sailors. Scythas shook his head silently, eyes darting up and down the philosopher’s mangled frame. I looked to Selene.

“Honey,” she whispered in a choked voice. “I have honey.”

“Will it be enough?”

Steam drifted up from the corners of her eyes. “No.”

“Sorea!” I snapped. The eagle landed on a bench beside the Gadfly, looking down at in a brief, distantly curious sort of way, before turning expectantly to regard me. “Can you get me Anastasia?”

Somehow, I knew he was offended that I’d even had to ask.

“Go. Now!”

The virtuous beast spread his wings wide and surged up into the sky, rocking the Eos with the force of his departure. He left us with a parting shriek that I chose to interpret as assurance. He’d find her, and he’d bring her to us. There was no other way.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Griffon snapped, and I turned to see two of the oarsmen freeze, halfway across the deck. Halfway across to the opposite benches, where two men already sat manning their oars.

“We-“ The first to speak hesitated.

The second finished. “We’re going to help them correct on their side. It’ll turn us faster-“

“We’re not turning around,” I declared. Further down the line of benches, another man protested.

“But the man said-“

I rose. The deck groaned beneath my feet. Every freedman fell silent, staring at me in naked trepidation.

“This man is my mentor,” I told them, lining every word with steel. “He is my mentor, as he was the mentor of my mentor’s mentor. My actions brought this harm to him, so it will have to be my actions that see it delivered from him. There is a physician in Olympia that can mend him. We are not turning around.”

“Solus,” Scythas said quietly, laying a hesitant hand on my shoulder. “There are physicians in other cities. If Griffon mans the oars and I fill the sails with wind, we can be at Krokos by dusk-“

“No,” I said, just as quietly. “Look at him, Scythas. Do you think he’ll last long enough for us to find another Anastasia?” Burning hazel eyes met mine, searching.

Whatever Scythas found in my eyes, it was enough. He nodded shallowly.

“Row.” I commanded the crew. Nine men and one pirate boy heaved against their oars, shouting in unified effort. An inexplicably kind wind began to fill the sails, rising in tandem with the Hero’s pneuma. Selene and Griffon were still knelt at the old philosopher’s side, spreading honey over his wounds from a beehive that she’d pulled out of her silks.

“Old ‘Zalus thinks we killed his daughter,” Scythas told me in grim resignation while the Eos picked up speed. “If he did this to the Gadfly… when he finds us, he’ll burn us all to cinders before we can explain a word.”

Griffon looked up from his healing work, scarlet eyes alight with wrath.

“He’ll try.”

Heat and cinders smoldered up from underneath the deck.

1.98

The Young Griffon

“You’re a Thracian,” Sol said, the pieces falling into place in his mind as they were in mine.

“I was born in Thracia,” Scythas corrected him, with the weariness of long practice. “I was raised in the Hurricane Heights. Since the day I stood under my own power, I’ve refined myself in the Greek style. In every way that matters, I am Greek.”

I began to understand. “And yet.”

“And yet,” Scythas murmured, “To the natural born citizens of the free cities, I am Thracian. I was, I am, and I will always be. The day my father died in Thracia, so long ago that I can’t even remember what he looked like, my mother bundled my newborn brother and I up in our wagon and rode our horse to death trying to reach the free cities. When the horse died she sold the wagon and all of its contents, everything we owned except for the clothes we were wearing and the meat from our horse. And she carried us the rest of the way.”

“Why?” Sol asked. Scythas shrugged.

“Prosperity, she told me. A better life. Her health was already at risk back then, having just recently given birth. The journey took most of her health from her, and when we reached the lands of northern Greece the squalls took what remained. She worked when she could find work to do, but the kind of work a weak and foreign woman is offered is sparse and often vile. It was difficult. We starved most days. The only reason she fed herself at all was because she knew my brother needed the milk. Once she had weaned him off of it, she hardly ate at all.”

Scythas sighed and looked up at the heavens. “My soul awoke the day she died. I was still too young to be worth anything as a laborer. Seven, maybe eight. I can’t remember. My brother had just learned how to walk. I was too young to be of use in the overturned breadbasket of the Free Mediterranean, but I was old enough to know it.

“My mother had always told me to seek the city in the sky, the City of Squalls and its Howling Wind Cult. That was prosperity. That was our salvation. Once every year the elders of the Howling Wind would descend from their airborne city and venture out into the mangled fields that had once served as the free world’s breadbasket, and they would sift through the detritus in search of promising souls. Those they found would be taken back to the city and subjected to the trials that preceded the rites. That was our only chance.

“We avoided the winds and lived off of scraps that I could find for us in the dirt until that the time for recruitment came. Men and women in cloth of vibrant green descended from their city, and all but one of them looked past us without hesitation.”

I scowled. But I wasn’t surprised. The Rosy Dawn turned away far more hopeful Civic cultivators than it admitted. The rest of the greater mystery cults were little different in the end.

“We were just skin and bones,” Scythas said, and oddly enough, his tone was almost fond as he recalled it. “Filthy and savage, hardly anything at all. Fortunately for us, one of the elders had no interest in leaving the eye of the storm, and was content to take me for no other reason than that my soul was awoken. He even let me bring my brother. For a moment, I thought I’d finally managed to grasp what my mother had been fruitlessly searching for since my father died.”

“But you failed,” I said, because I understood that attending the trials that preceded the rites in a mystery cult was not the same thing as becoming an initiate.

“I failed,” Scythas confirmed. “I was skin and bones, and I had never received a formal education. I had no idea how to cultivate. My first attempt at carving a block of spirit marble with my pneuma was hideous to behold.”

“What happened then?” Sol asked him quietly.

“When a hopeful initiate fails, they are encouraged to try again the next year and escorted from the city,” Scythas explained. “Another year down in the hurricane wastes would have been a death sentence for my brother and I. Thankfully, apathy saved us once again.”

It wasn’t funny at all, but I couldn’t help it. I chuckled.

“The elder didn’t want to escort you back down.”

Scythas’ lips twitched at their corners. He shook his head. “Elder Demeas was many things. Dutiful was not one of them. He took one look at me and my brother, both of us in tears - me because I’d failed and my brother because I was crying - and he just… waved us off. He knew we had nothing waiting for us down below, but he didn’t care enough to take us in. So he cast us out into the City of Squalls and told us to begone from his sight until the next year’s recruitment came around. If I was still alive by then, he’d sponsor my next attempt so that he could avoid descending from the city at all.”

“Kind of him,” I mused. “And cruel, as well. A foreigner is only ever welcome for their wealth.”

Scythas snorted. “A lesson I learned quickly.”

Scythas whistled a soft, errant note, and the winds traveling west along the surface of the Aegean abruptly shifted and whirled up into the Eos’ sail, filling it to its limit and doubling our pace alongside the rowing of my pankration hands.

“You made it to the next year’s trial,” Sol observed. “Did someone else take you in?”

“No one.” Scythas shook his head. “Just the wind. There was no one in a city of Civic cultivators that would hire on a filthy Thracian street rat, no matter how well I spoke the language or how hard I swore to work. So I did the only thing I could do to keep my brother healthy and whole.”

“No one would give,” I mused. “So you took.”

The light behind the Hero’s eyes flickered, in time with the beating of his heart. Just the slightest bit mischievous. “In their own way, a thief can be a scholar of the wind as well. The breeze can mask noise as well as carry it. Carry the smell of a grimy street rat to an unsuspecting merchant’s nose, or otherwise away from it, depending on which direction they approached from. And in the City of Squalls especially, the wind can cut purse strings as well as any knife.

“When the initiation trials next came around, I had refined my cultivation several stages and was no longer skin and bones. Elder Demeas was intrigued enough by my progress and healthy appearance to personally advise me in the moments before I carved my spirit marble, and with his wisdom I passed. I gained admittance to the Howling Wind Cult, and in so doing secured a prosperous life for my brother and I. Just like my mother wanted.”

“If that’s so,” Sol said, knowing the false resolution for what it was, “Then why are you here?”

“As it turned out, the thieving life had done my body and my soul a service,” Scythas said, and the levity in his voice ran directly counter to the black wavering of his heart. “I was no longer skin and bones, and my rapid ascent through the early ranks of the Civic Realm had refined me into something less repulsive to the eye. After I’d had a proper bath and a set of cult robes allotted to me, a few of my fellow junior mystikos even remarked on my appearance.

The Hero of the Scything Squall smiled, lovely as any marble beauty. “They said that I looked pretty. Almost like a girl.”

A lead weight settled in my stomach.

“I fell into the daily duties of a junior mystiko without issue. I struggled at first with the mathematical lessons, even with Elder Demeas doing his best to tutor me when he bothered to come out from behind closed doors. Still, I more than made up for it in my martial pursuits. The wind was with me from the start. My seniors said they’d never seen anything like it in someone my age. My peers envied or admired me, more often than not both.

“A year passed. Then two. Before I knew it I had become something of a rising star within the Howling Wind Cult. At twelve years old I ascended to the Sophic Realm. It was an achievement worth celebrating, even by the standards of a greater mystery cult. Worthy of an entire day’s celebration, with all of the cult in attendance. At the end of the feast, I was invited to approach the true Eye of the Storm, the kyrios’ own throne, to receive a reward for my efforts from the head of the cult himself.

“Naturally, as I had progressed through the Civic Realm, I had further refined my body - and grown older besides. By that point, it had become a running joke among my peers that I was easier on the eyes than any of the cult’s young beauties,” Scythas explained, rolling his eyes good-naturedly.

I leaned back into the ship’s wooden figurehead, away from the black thumping of his heart. Sol straightened up from his slouch against the rail. His expression steadily darkening.

“As it turned out, the kyrios agreed.”

“No,” I said, unable to believe it. I refused to believe it.

“As a reward for my exceptional efforts in refining my soul, I was gifted three clay jugs filled to their rims with the Howling Wind’s finest undiluted kykeon, as well as a sack full of spirit olives and a set of silk robes that only senior mystikos had the privilege of wearing. However, to my great fortune, the Tyrant that rose in the Hurricane Hierophant’s absence decided to reward my exceptional refinement of my body with an offer of personal tutelage.”

“What,” Sol said flatly. That storm was raging in his eyes.

“A Thracian boy with nothing to his name but what his cult had given him. How could I have been anything but thankful?” Scythas’ smile was an objectively beautiful thing. Yet the longer I looked at it, the more furiously sickened I became. “He took me under his wing, taught me the secrets hidden in the hurricane winds. For the next ten years, I served directly underneath him.”

Among heaven and earth, there were certain immutable truths. One of them was this.

“As his catamite.”

A Tyrant’s hunger was an insatiable thing.

The Hero of the Scything Squall pulled back the veil around his heart, locking eyes with me again. Just long enough for me to feel what he felt. Every oar in the Eos groaned and snapped out of its frame, wrenched to pieces by the clenching of my violent intent. Miraculously, the men of the ship didn’t stir at the mad cascade. For the same reason that the daughter of the Oracle hadn’t once stirred from her slumber since Scythas had spoken up, if I had to guess - the wind had carried the sound of it away at his request.

“I’m unfamiliar with the culture in Rome, Solus, so this may sound odd to you,” the Hero said to Sol while maintaining eye contact with me. “But in Greece, there is a practice known as pedarasty.”

“Boy love,” Sol echoed, as disgusted as I’d ever seen him. Scythas inclined his head.

“A physical union between a man and a boy, with the offer of mentorship often implied. For ten years, this was my arrangement with the kyrios of the Howling Wind Cult. Under him, I grew and climbed the ranks of the Sophic Realm, all the way to the peak that lingers at the edge of mortality - Captain of the Sophic Realm, and only just over twenty years old. A magnificent feat. During that time, my brother grew older and awakened his own soul. Close as the kyrios kept me, it was only a given that my brother would be accepted into the cult as well.

“Our lives were prosperous. We’d found our salvation,” Scythas explained, while his heart bled black bile over my new sensory perception. I muscled down the urge to gag.

“In the end, my brother inherited our mother’s fine features as well.”

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. I felt ill.

“Ten years I suffered his touch.” The Hero’s expression cracked, the truth of his heart showing in the gaps between it. His voice hitched, but only for a moment. “And I was content with that. My brother was healthy and whole, thriving as much as any Young Aristocrat - he’d been so young during our starving days that he couldn’t even remember them. That made it worthwhile. As far as I was concerned, that was the scale balanced.

“But when the Eye of the Storm turned away from me to look at him, that was a step too far. If he laid his hands on my brother as he had on me, then all of it was for nothing. All of it was for nothing. I was defiled for no one. My virtuous heart wouldn’t allow it.

“The moment I heard the whispers that the kyrios had offered my brother a private lesson in his own estate, I flew into a rage. I went to his quarters immediately and I told him I would strike him down where he stood if he ever laid a hand on my brother.”

I stared at the image of a Hero that I had never seen before. In the scything winds that whipped through the sea around our ship like blades, tearing gouges from the waves like a giant’s lashing dagger, I heard the promise of retribution. In his furious hazel glare, run through by veins of shining gold, I saw the surety of glory. And in the thunderous beating of his heart, I felt the hurricane’s wrath.

“A Philosopher threatening a Tyrant is a ludicrous thing,” Scythas said softly, murder in every word. “But a Captain of the Sophic Realm is more than just a Philosopher. He is a threat of retribution. Only half a step from glory. And all the more likely in their inexperience to be reckless with that glory once they’ve grasped it.

“I promised the man that led the Howling Wind that I would cast him down if he ever touched my brother, even if I had to burn my heart to ashes in the process. He believed me.”

Of course he did. I would have believed it in his place.

“He hated me for it, of course. Lashed out, called me every name that had been whispered in the halls of the cult for the last ten years - they all had the same meaning in the end. Boy whore. They were nothing new, and because of that they couldn’t hurt me. But when I made him swear our oath on the Styx, made him swear it beneath the view of raging heaven, he went a step further than that. He found the words that could still cut me.

“Closer to a Scythian than a Greek.”

He said it in another man’s voice. One that I hadn’t heard before - the Eye of the Storm’s voice. The kyrios of the Howling Wind Cult.

I engraved it in my memory.

“He called into question my right to invoke the Styx. He called into question my identity as a Greek, when that was all I’d thought of myself as since the bleakest early days of my life. It surprised me how much it stung.”

Scythas splayed his hands, offering the truth up to me in all its ugly splendor. “When those bees stung me, I dreamt I was a boy again. I dreamt that all the world had been consumed by the hurricane, and all that remained was the Eye of the Storm. I dreamt that I was in his quarters, and felt his hands on my body. I dreamt I was a catamite once more.”

All at once, the veil slammed down over his heart once more and the Hero sagged back on his rowing bench like he’d just run a hundred marathons.

“I wasn’t Scythas when I came to Olympia,” he muttered, cradling his head in his hands and rubbing at his temples. “Not until Bakkhos took me into his confidence and shared his story with me. I don’t know how much he knew explicitly, and how much of it was just a feeling. But he… he understood. Not every element of it, maybe, not personally. But he understood.

“Everywhere you go, you’ll be the foreigner,” Scythas said in Bakkhos’ voice. “Accept it now or when you’re dead. That truth will never change.” He chuckled faintly. “He was never soft, but he was kind in his own way. He was the one that told me a name chosen was worth just as much as a name received. Sometimes more. He told me I could take a Greek name to replace the Thracian one that my mother gave me. He said it might help, at least in the cities where I wasn’t known.”

I shook my head, marveling at the audacity of it. “So you chose the most Thracian name that you possibly could, short of Thrascas.”

Scythas. The Scythian.

In every way that mattered, closer to a Scythian than a Greek.

1.97

The Young Griffon

Scythas and Sol’s quiet conversation abruptly ended when I joined them at the front of the ship. The Hero glanced at me uncertainly, having no doubt overheard my conversation with Selene - as he overheard most all things that he cared to. Sol acknowledged me with a nod and twisted to lean an arm against the ship’s rail, looking out over the waves pensively.

I stepped through the gap that separated the two of them and climbed up onto the Eos’ figurehead, a woman carved from wood with both hands cupping her cheeks. In the vision of my father and my uncles that Chilon’s story had shown us, the wooden woman had been reaching wantonly for the horizon. I leaned against her with my back to the sea, crossing my legs at their ankles and my arms over my chest.

At some point, she’d changed.

“I saw my family,” I said without preamble. I had their attention at once. “While Sol was speaking to his faceless friend, I saw the boys and girls that I grew up with - but as men and women instead. It was the final stage of the rites. A delusion.”

“What?” Scythas asked, confused. I frowned, considering the figurehead’s expression as she considered the sea. The naked desire of her first rendition was gone, replaced by a puzzled wonder.

“Every greater mystery cult has its theme,” I said, and Scythas nodded once. Sol was still confused, so I elaborated, “The Rosy Dawn is governed by light and the Burning Dusk by heat, both of them the flame. The Broken Tide by the waves. The Howling Wind, and so on. These traits are foundational. They’re the first tools that an exceptional mystiko uses to build upon their cultivation.”

“Your point being?” Scythas asked.

“Bakkhos was born and raised in Thracia. He loved Orpheus like a brother and buried him with honors. And if he was telling you the truth, he would even return from time to time, to share a drink with his friend beneath the earth. Bakkhos was the kyrios of the Raging Heaven, but he did not study there - not in his formative years. It isn’t lightning that defined him. His domain lay elsewhere.”

“The Mad Tyrant,” Sol realized, eyebrows raising as he followed my train of thought. The fell thread that connected our misadventure to our companions race through chthonic beehive tombs. “Delusion. Madness.”

The ivory gates had confounded Scythas and Selene just as the milk and honey had addled our senses. They’d told us that it was our voices they had heard on the other side of the gates, and that was why they had tried to leave. In reality, the mad acoustics of the singing house had fooled them, twisted the sounds of the Thracian gatekeepers trying to murder our horses. Sol and I had seen things I had few words for, and the commonality in every shifting vision had been the madness - inflicted by the Mother, inflicted by the deaths of friends, inflicted by the turning of the wheel.

“You’re saying he studied the Orphic mysteries?” Scythas murmured, a growing frown on his lips.

They found him in a field of grape vines, half-submerged in the dirt. Like his parents had tried to bury him and given up partway through.

I sighed. “I’m saying that if anyone rose to the heights that Bakkhos rose to by using what Sol and I just experienced as their foundation, Mad Tyrant would be an entirely appropriate title. You knew him better than we did, though you denied it at his funeral-” Scythas grimaced, but didn’t gainsay me. “-so I can only speculate.”

“Did the late kyrios have any interests or abilities that would coincide with what we all went through last night?” Sol asked him quietly. “A passion for singing? A talent for the lyre?”

“The kyrios had a talent for most things,” Scythas said. I hummed, considering the fading red marks on his face and arms. His stings were healing swiftly, based on how ugly they had been before in Selene’s recollection. Sol followed my eyes, his train of thought matching my own.

“Including beekeeping?”

The Hero’s expression didn’t shift in the slightest degree. But his heart did.

“Bakkhos was a beekeeper,” I said, considering that new knowledge. Scythas’ eyes flickered, chagrined. “And he was also known for his madness. Perhaps the connection is there. Perhaps it isn’t. Either way, while under the influence of the Orphic mystery, I saw grim delusions designed to cut me to my core.“

And so did you.

I didn’t say it, though I was nearly certain that it was true. Had we been having this conversation even an hour before, I would have.

Not everyone is made of iron, Griffon. For some people, the fire only burns.

Instead, I offered up a portion of myself.

“The sons and daughters of the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk have no reason to fear the light of day, nor the heat of scouring flame,” I said, raising a hand and unfurling its fingers. The rosy light of dawn bloomed in my palm and crept up each digit, glowing brightly and throwing off heat like a campfire. “Our bodies are tempered by the sun.”

“I’m familiar with your city, yes,” Scythas said, rolling his eyes. “And I’m still waiting for you to get to your point.”

I felt his heart flicker and betray his feigned irritation, another whisper of sensation that wasn’t meant to be shared and so I only dimly overheard. Something like fear, maybe, or at least a deep unease. He’d seen the trajectory of the conversation, and he didn’t like where it lead.

“It’s alright.” Sol reached out and clapped the Hero on the shoulder, storm gray eyes not wavering from me as he did it. “This isn’t an attack.”

Only once the words were spoken did Scythas’ expression flicker, showing his unease. The Hero exhaled and nodded. But it wasn’t until a beat later, when the whispers of his heart had fully receded, that Sol squeezed his shoulder once and let go. As if he’d known to wait.

As if he’d felt it for himself. The raven in my shadow reached out for Sol’s. In the dead of night, sitting as close as we were, it didn’t stir our silhouettes.

“You can feel it, too?”

Sol frowned faintly. “Feel what?”

“His heart. You weren’t responding to his heart just now?”

The Roman looked at me strangely. “I suppose, if you want to be Greek about it.”

It was a struggle not to let my irritation show.

“I’m not being florid. I’m asking if you’ve gained a Hero’s heart sense as well.”

“No. I don’t need to ‘feel’ his heart to know that he’s uneasy.”

Like he was simply reading the room. Ridiculous, empathetic Roman.

I raised thirty more pankration hands around me, each of them unfurling like the blooming petals of a rose. Calling up the light of dawn.

Perhaps my approach had been wrong from the start.

“Tempered by the sun,” I said again, a quiet prayer. “In the Scarlet City, it’s considered good fortune to be born during the day. If a mother is lucky enough to give birth while the sun is still up, the first thing she’ll do is raise her child to it. It’s said that if the first thing a newborn sees is the blinding light above, they’ll be better suited to its study when they’re older. This continues into the child’s formative years.

“Tempered by light. Tempered by heat. Blinded and burned, because the foundational techniques of the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk are as dangerous to the user as they are to the target. The Rosy Fingers of Dawn and the Burning Edge of Dusk.”

Cultivators refined the body as well as the soul. We grew stronger, taller, and better defined physically at the same time that we grew wiser, more spirited, and hungrier. A powerful body with a weak soul was a senseless, worthless beast. A powerful soul with a weak body was an ember in a bed of dry leaves. A balance was required.

Scythas knew this as well as I did. He’d been tempered in his own way, as had every cultivator - the ones that had made it to his level of refinement, at least. Any cultivator that could call upon the Rosy-Fingered Dawn had been tempered by the sun. In the same way, any cultivator that could bend the wind to their whims like Scythas had been tempered by the tempest.

All that changed was how the tempering was done.

Not every man was made of iron.

“When I was four years old, my father taught me how to make a fire,” I explained. Of my two flesh and blood hands and thirty manifested hands of intent, only one was still dark and cool. Idly, I rubbed together the thumb, index, and middle fingertips of that hand. Slowly, the motion generated warmth. “He took me out into the forest and showed me the proper wood to gather, taught me which materials would serve best as kindling. Tell me, Sol, if I asked you to light a fire right now, how would you do it?”

“I’d use one of those,” he said at once, gesturing to my thirty-one burning hands. I nodded. Using a pre-existing flame was the easiest and most common method. It was why every Greek citizen kept a hearth lit in their home.

“And if there was no flame around to borrow from?”

“There’s always flame around,” the Hero said, his eyes flickering hazel and gold. I smiled faintly.

“Granted, for you. But we’re only Philosophers of the second rank. Our hearts have yet to burn.”

The Hero snorted in disbelief. To Sol, he offered a sarcastic slow clap, “So you advanced last night, from the first rank to the second. Congratulations, Solus.”

“Thank you,” the Roman said genuinely. Scythas groaned. To me, he answered, “Without another flame I’d use a flint.”

“Right. And if you had no flint?”

“Friction,” Sol answered, eyeing my fingertips. I raised them up so Scythas would see them too, feeling the heat build where my skin rubbed together.

“Exactly.” I confirmed. “We used sticks. It was difficult, and I was young, but my soul was awake and I was strong enough to see it done. He instructed me on how to nurture that flame, first with my breath and then by feeding it kindling. Soon enough we had a robust campfire. And my father took my hands in his, told me that it was these hands that had done the work alone. From beginning to end, I had cultivated that flame. I was ecstatic.”

I chuckled softly at the memory.

“Then he pulled our hands into the fire, and held them there.”

Two heart’s flickered. The one belonging to the Hero, as well as the one belonging to the Heroine doing her best to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping.

“My hands healed, as you can see,” I said, flourishing my rosy fingers while the unburning fingers continued to rub together. “The next time my father told me to build a fire, I was somewhat less enthused. But I built it, this time without any instruction, and when it was lit he congratulated me on a job well done. Then, as before, he took my hands in his.”

“That’s barbaric!” Selene protested from further down the ship, causing the sea dogs around her to stir and grumble in their sleep.

“Ho? You’re calling my father a barbarian?”

Abandoning her attempt at privacy, she gathering up her sunray silks and philosopher rags and crossed the deck to join us at the front of the ship. She sat down directly across from me, completing our little diamond formation, and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I’m calling a cruelty a cruelty,” she said firmly. “That couldn’t have been the only way to temper you. At four years old, no less.”

“Not the only way, no,” I agreed. “He would also make me stare up at the sun with him on particularly bright days.”

“Greeks,” Sol cursed wearily. The daughter of the Oracle just stared up at me, aghast.

“Perhaps it was a cruelty, and perhaps it wasn’t necessary,” I acknowledged. “But whether it was by coincidence or by design, I was tempered far beyond the rest of my peers when it came time to take the dawn in hand. With time, the pain faded and the scars healed. It’s a common failing of the Rosy-Fingered Dawn that its own users can be blinded by its light if they aren’t careful. I’m sure you’ve all encountered for yourselves the double nature of the Burning-Edged Dusk, scorching its wielders as often as it does their opponents.

“The more a scarlet son is tempered, and the stronger the flame that does the work, the more they can withstand when their soul invokes their mystery faith. But even then, there is generally a limit.”

I snapped the fingers that I had been rubbing together, creating a spark that quickly turned to flame, spreading down my thirty-second hand and burning cheerfully in the night.

“I haven’t suffered a burn since I was a child,” I said, shrugging shallowly and staring into the searing lights. The Heroic cultivators and Sol all looked away. It was too bright for them. “In the end, the fire was what I needed. It made me stronger. And I suppose it was my hubris to assume that this was a trait I shared with every man and woman.”

Try being honest.

“The children I grew up with weren’t raised the way that I was,” I admitted to the Heroes and to Sol. “All this time, I was certain that that was the reason why they ended up lesser than they could have been. I knew, deep within my heart, that if they had only been raised the way that I was raised, they would have been stronger. Greater. Better.

“But while I was under the influence of the Orphic cult’s milk and honey, I saw that ideal image made real. I saw them as I’d always imagined they could be, as men and women I’d be happy to stand beside no matter where we were headed or what stood in our path. I saw them as my equals, in heart and soul.”

There was something in Sol’s face, something I couldn’t discern. If he had a Hero’s passionate communication, I might have been able to glean it from his heart. And if I had his empathy, I might have recognized it regardless. But he didn’t, and neither did I.

You are a shadow, aren’t you?

“They couldn’t stand the sight of me,” I whispered.

“It was a delusion,” Sol said at once. “Nothing real.”

“Perhaps.” The lights of dawn flickered and went out one by one. “Perhaps.”

We sat in silence, waiting for the waves to bring us home. I sent my pankration hands out to work the oars once again, formless and without heat. The steady sounds of water parting around them beckoned us peacefully to the realm of dreams.

A cultivator could do without sleep for a long while, but the past week had been more eventful than most. Eventually, Selene drifted off, sprawling out on the deck with her head on Sol’s thigh as a cushion. The Roman kept on brooding, his eyes half-lidded and distant while the storm rumbled behind them. Thinking about where he was going and how he intended to get there, I imagined. Eventually, my eyes drifted shut too.

“Closer to a Scythian than a Greek.”

My eyes flew open.

Scythas stared steadily back at me. The shadows of the night cast by stars made his expression look haunted.

“Hm?” Sol rumbled, turning his head to regard the Hero.

“It’s a Greek saying,” I explained, because I could see in his eyes that the Hero expected me to. “Most commonly spoken in the Hurricane Heights, which are furthest north and closest to the lands we just departed. In reference to a Thracian and their culture, despite the fact that they share borders with each of our nations - even so, they’re closer to a Scythian than they are to a Greek.”

“You can tell when people are lying, or at least you think you can,” Scythas continued, not breaking eye contact with me. I nodded shallowly. Now more than ever, that was true. “So can I. Not always, and not in every context. But there is one circumstance where I can always tell.”

“That being?” Sol asked. I didn’t raise my pneuma, and neither did he. If the Hero chose to start a fight here and now, he’d be dooming himself as surely as he’d be dooming us. He was on our ship, and from horizon-to-horizon there lay nothing but the open sea.

“A name given to a child by their parents, and a name that they’ve chosen for themselves. I can always tell the difference.”

Sol and I shared a look.

“You weren’t born Griffon,” Scythas told me. Didn’t ask. His eyes finally shifted away from me, just for a moment. “And you weren’t born Solus.”

“Griffon is my name.”

“And Scythas is mine,” the Hero agreed. “But we chose those names for ourselves. Tell me I’m wrong.”

I didn’t.

1.96

The Young Griffon

By sunset we had returned.

The lands of Thracia were vast, and we had traveled them for long days and longer nights. Cultivators of our stature could have made the trip on foot in better time, Heroic cultivators like Scythas and the Scarlet Oracle’s daughter even faster than that - a day, perhaps two. When a refined man wasn’t burdened by a horse’s fragile constitution, much could be done. A mundane horse, that was.

Kronia and Atlas returned us to the southern coast that lined the Aegean Sea in a quarter of the time that it had taken them to deliver us to the Orphic House. The sun was still shining on the horizon when we caught sight of the Eos’ sails, not even a full day since we’d drank from cups of ivory and horn. Not even a full day since we’d lived, and died, and lived again through the eyes of a higher power.

This world was not what it should have been. I had known that for some time now, though I had avoided the fact. What Sol and I had seen in that place, what Scythas had shown us in the midnight field of Thracian vines, every shambling tribe up and down the River Ebros, it had all only hammered the point home.

The lands beyond the Scarlet City were dim and fallen from their prime. But this world had been golden-bright once. As we approached my family’s ship and the Heroes waving at us from the docks, I wondered if it could be again.

Kronia delivered me to the docks first. She was smaller than Sol’s charger, but I’d known from the moment I saw her prance out of her stable that she was a beast built for speed. Now, she was even more so.

Scythas looked her up and down in awe as she ran circles up and down the docks, knowing the journey was done but itching to keep moving even still. The white mare’s joy had been a warm and infectious thing ever since she’d taken off running from the Orphic House. She had always loved to run, and after having her first taste of virtue she was better at it than any mundane animal of her kind. She was swift. She was graceful.

She was mine.

“She’s awake,” the Hero said as we cantered by him for a third time, unable to believe it. “What did you do-?”

“Where did you go?” the daughter of the Scarlet Oracle asked the more pertinent question. Scythas shook himself of his wonder.

“Right. Right! What the fuck happened back there?”

“We could ask you two the same thing,” I said mildly.

“Without a word - without even a word. One moment we were all in that odeon together and the next moment the two of you were gone! Where have you been?”

Atlas arrived, the sturdy wooden docks that had taken Kronia’s weight without complaint groaning and creaking dangerously beneath the Roman and his warhorse. The charger lowered his head, steam billowing from his nostrils and out from the creases between his teeth, and glared imperiously down at the Heroic cultivators on the docks.

What the newly woken stallion lacked in speed, he more than made up for in presence and strength. He looked like he’d come charging straight out of the underworld itself. The axe wound that the gatekeeper had left in his side still bled, agitated by our sprint across the unbordered lands of Thracia - along with the hole left behind by the Roman’s own spear.

Naturally, my idiot Roman brother had the wounds to match his horse - self-inflicted of course.

“Solus,” Selene said, aghast while her eyes traced the worst of it. “You’re hurt.”

Crusted blood on both legs, the evidence of stab wounds in the backs of both knees. A puncture wound just to the left of his heart, not unlike the one that a certain bastard pirate child had inflicted upon me with a gastraphetes. Numerous ugly bruises, growing darker and uglier by the hour, inflicted by fists and boots and staffs of tightly bound vine. He looked like he had just come from exactly where we’d just come from. My complete lack of wounds by contrast likely made it even more startling.

“The two of you have seen better days as well,” Sol observed.

“What happened?” Scythas asked him, and I could only guess as to the monsters responsible for the damage that he was picturing in his head.

Sol cleared his throat and spat a mouthful of blood onto the dock beside his horse. “We spoke to Orpheus.”

“Orpheus the dead man?”

“Both of you?” Selene asked. The question after that she left implied - why was I in fine condition, while the Roman here was mangled?

“We took part in the Augur’s mystery rites,” I explained. I shrugged at their dubious looks. “The gatekeepers gave us cups of ivory or horn, each of them filled with a mixture of milk and honey with psychoactive properties. The standard fare for any cult’s initiation, just… a bit more potent.”

Sol snorted. It was admittedly an understatement.

Scythas looked the Roman pointedly up and down. “And then?”

During the ride back to the southern coast where we’d docked our ship, Sol and I had discussed many things. The first among them had been what exactly each of us had seen after imbibing our cups of milk and honey. We’d realized quickly that each of us had suffered the same exact visions of the late and future Zagreus’ life. It wasn’t until afterwards that our experiences had diverged. For me, it had been the delusions of cousins that could have been. For Sol, it had been something entirely different.

The Roman grimaced, his eyes distant as he recalled it. “There are greater and lesser mysteries. Corpses of heroes and corpses of gods. I don’t know if the subject of the Orphic faith stands among the greats, but he was far more than just a hero.”

The Scarlet Oracle’s daughter blinked. “He?”

“You met him,” Scythas said wonderingly. Making entirely the wrong connection. “You remember him. His identity, or - his appearance, maybe? His name? Can you remember his name?”

“I remember asking for it,” Sol said, irritated at the memory of it. “He said it didn’t matter.”

“You spoke to him?” Selene asked, stepping forward excitedly and reaching up to grip his shins. Atlas snorted warningly, but the stallion didn’t stop her. “And he responded?”

“You spoke to a dead god,” Scythas said, making certain of it. Had it been a god? Had any of it been real at all? Or had we seen what we’d wanted to see, been told what we wanted to be told, all within the boundaries of our milk and honey delusion? I still wasn’t sure.

Sol sighed. “Maybe. But it was brief, and it ended in disagreement.”

I rolled my eyes as another absurdity took shape in Scythas’ mind.

§

Was misfortune alone to blame?

That had been my first instinct. It had been my first conclusion, the one that I found easiest to accept. Every cultivator that coveted the heights knew the Fates were against them, if not today then tomorrow or the day after that. It was easy to blame my circumstances on the women that toiled at heaven’s loom. It made things simple.

But if I accepted that, then I had to accept that everything was their doing. I had to give to them my all of my joys as well as my sorrows. I had to credit them with my triumphs along with my tragedies. If I wanted to hide behind their skirts and blame my discontent on their destiny threads, I had to surrender all that I was, all that I had been, and all that I would ever be to the Fates.

I refused to give myself to them. I’d die before I did.

Who to blame, then? Blame my father, who had suffered under a Tyrant’s yoke in his youth just as I had? Blame my cousins, who had shed blood and tears trying save me from my own discontent? Blame my aunts and uncles, blame the elders, blame the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk, and Raging Heaven besides?

Blame the Father. Blame the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. Blame the world.

Ridiculous.

The sea dogs that sailed the Eos took a break from their rowing sometime after the moon passed its zenith. The stars above the Aegean Sea lit the waves and guided our way, while the unseen hands of my intent steadily worked the ship’s oars. Our sailors sprawled across their benches and curled up with their backs to the ship’s rails, dropping off into dreams as soon as they found a comfortable place. They’d run themselves ragged, the memory of their liberation still fresh enough that they were eager to please us.

Kronia and Atlas were sound asleep at the aft deck, their exhalations like campfire heat on our backs. We’d been forced to shift benches and move men to accommodate them, but we had done it and the virtuous beasts had complied with the journey. They were fatigued enough from their journey and awakening that I imagined they could have fallen asleep in that sack filled with snakes that Sol had threatened the stallion with days ago.

Sol sat cross-legged at the front of the ship, by her wood-carved figurehead. Scythas sat facing the Roman on the bench just beside him. They were conversing quietly, the Hero of the Scything Squall shaking his head or gesturing shallowly with his hands.

It had been a necessity to seat the Roman opposite the horses, as we’d discovered when Atlas stepped off the dock with Sol on his back and nearly capsized the ship. The issue of the beasts was self-evident, Atlas weighing as much as ten men all on his own, but the Roman had been a surprise. Whether it was his advancement or his brush with deviation that was to blame, he walked now with a weight that he hadn’t carried before. Scythas and Selene had both had their theories as to the cause, but Sol hadn’t volunteered the likely cause. I hadn’t forced the issue for him.

It would have hardly been fair, seeing as I had no intention of volunteering my own tribulation either.

I leaned my head back against the Eos’ mast. On the other side of it, the daughter of the Oracle hummed a quiet tune under her breath. I contemplated the lunar glory.

“Honey and wine,” I murmured.

“And two horses, besides,” she replied. “I’d say this first venture was a success.”

“Perhaps.”

Returning to the Eos had been the correct choice in the end. Our Heroic companions had chosen the same course of action, though they’d been flung nearly as far afield as the Orphic House had been, in an entirely different cardinal direction. Lost in chthonic hives, wandering the underworld in search of a true way out - a gate of horn instead of ivory. We’d traded stories while the Eos pulled away from the Thracian coast and the sun fell out of the sky, interjecting with the occasional jab or disbelieving demand for further detail.

When pressed, Sol had presented a single cup of golden wine from the depths of his shadow. A gift from the faceless man that he had spoken to while I was conversing with my familial delusions. It seemed that even while his legion had dragged him down into the dark, he’d had the presence of mind to snatch it as he fell.

To back their own claims, Selene had pulled an honest to god bee hive from a fold in her sunray silks, marred by teeth marks and oozing honey. Honey to heal the chthonic stings, and clear their psychoactive venom from the Hero’s veins.

But why had she eaten it?

“Perhaps?” the daughter of the Oracle asked, puzzled, and tilted her head to look at me from the other side of the ship’s mast. “What about it was a failure?”

She’d lied to us when she told her story. I didn’t know how, or why, but I knew that she had. I could feel it, in the whispered echoes of her heart. Something vaguely overheard, in the same way I had overheard with my Sophic sense the whispers of Socrates’ rhetoric while he thrashed Sol and I in his cave.

A cultivator could refine their senses the further they advanced and open themselves up to novel ones in turn. That did not make us omnipotent, though. We could detect another cultivator’s pneuma with our Civic sense, gauge their relative standing so long as it was not too far above our own, but only if that other cultivator chose to show their strength to the world. To speak it, rather than hold it in.

It was the same for the Sophic sense, the Philosopher’s perception that allowed them to detect and respond to the rhetoric of their peers. When I invoked a principle or declared a truth for all the world to hear, it meant I wanted to be heard. Anyone with an ear for rhetoric would hear it if they wanted to. Socrates’s invocation of truths in that cave hadn’t been presented to us in this way. He’d kept it to himself. He’d made us work to hear even a trace of it. It made his rhetoric nearly impossible to directly counteract - it was the difference between a whisper and a shout.

As it happened, this held true for Heroes as well.

I could feel the whispers of Selene and Scythas’ hearts in a way that I couldn’t any other soul on the ship. There was feeling there that I could perceive, like the faintest tapping on my ribs. Too quiet and tightly guarded to fully understand, impossible to put into words. If I had to compare it to something, it was like the flames behind their eyes. Ever burning, but not hot enough to feel the heat. Not bright enough to blind.

But I could feel the flames flicker when their hearts were provoked, and that was enough to guess. Selene had lied, through omission if nothing else, and so had Scythas. Which portions of their story, I couldn’t be sure. But I had felt the flames flicker. I had listened, straining as hard as I could with the new perception that Orpheus had awoken in me, and I had felt their momentary hesitance.

“I’ve learned more in these five days than I did any given year at the Rosy Dawn, studying under the wisest men the Scarlet City could provide me,” I finally said. “I’ve seen sights I had only heard stories of before. I’ve meet men and women as different from me as I am from Sol, and I’ve seen for myself the disparity in our cultures. Weeks like these are why I left my home. Experiences like these are what I knew from the beginning that I desired beyond all else. Yet here I am at the end of it, and I feel emptier than I did before. How? Why?”

“You think too much.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

Selene shrugged, brushed golden hair out of her eyes and shifting her sunset veil away from her face. Glancing back at me while I glanced back at her, she smiled faintly.

“Thracia is a beautiful nation, isn’t it?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Which portion of it?”

“Its yellow mountain ranges and the lush valleys between. Its beasts - the bears and the snuffling pigs that lumber through its undergrowths, and the foxes and hopping goats that wander its heights. The rivers that run through it from the Aegean to its furthest unknown boundaries. And the snow. The snow that coats every thistle and pine once you’ve gone north far enough. A true northern winter, not the faint approximation we feel in our cities. Wasn’t it all incredible to see?”

I considered that for a long moment. It was a struggle, a titanic effort, to separate the sights from the disappointment that had tainted them in my memory. But when I did…

“It was,” I realized. “It was beautiful. All of it.”

And I had ruined it for myself. Not Scythas with his stories of the late Bakkhos. Not the people of Thracia or the gatekeepers of the Orphic House with their crude irreverence. Me.

“I haven’t left the city of Olympia in years, and when I did I never went far,” the daughter of the Oracle said knowingly. “This is all new to me. Every sight and sound seems more vibrant, somehow. Lighter-“

“Golden-bright,” I whispered.

“Exactly.” She nodded happily. “You’ve seen things in five days that most people would give their arms and legs to experience, and you’ve come out of it with a horse that any cultivator would pay a fortune for. I don’t know what it is you thought you’d find out here, Griffon, but you’re letting it blind you to what you did. You do that a lot, I think.”

I scoffed. “You’ve only known me for a week.”

“I’ve known you longer than that,” she disagreed. “Solus speaks about you often.”

The moon was bright tonight.

“And while I may not have Scythas’ ear, I do pay attention to the gossip on the mountain. You make waves wherever you go, it seems. Why? Why provoke people the way that you do?”

I shrugged. “It amuses me.”

To my shock and my rage, I felt my own heart flicker. I hadn’t spoken a lie. Ugly, treacherous heart, I hadn’t spoken a lie.

“That isn’t all,” Selene murmured.

My lip lifted from my teeth.

“You have high expectations. I understand that. And I also believe, from what Solus has told me and what I’ve observed of your actions in our short time together, that you want people to meet your expectations. You want to help them exceed them.”

“Junior sister, tell me more.”

“Gladly, senior brother,” she said, unbothered by my sarcasm. “You are an arrogant man that thinks the world of himself, because you have yet to be proven wrong in any way that matters.”

“Ho, I see.”

“Unfortunately, the more that you are proven right, the more that you resent the world for failing to prove you wrong. Because you know the way you act is cruel - like the world and all its people are made of iron. Like you can temper their weak points if you only apply enough heat.”

I stood.

“It’s admirable that you want them to be better,” she said, remaining seated with her back to the mast. She looked up at me earnestly, the scarlet lights behind her eyes burning brighter as she expressed the truth of it with her heart. “But not everyone is made of iron, Griffon. For some people, the fire only burns.”

I turned away from her and walked up the deck, towards Sol and the Hero of the Scything Squall. As I did, the Oracle’s daughter offered me one last piece of advice.

“Try being honest!”

1.95 [Sacrament of Salt and Ash]

Son of Rome

Wrathful hands seized me by the neck. They gripped fistfuls of hair that I had allowed to grow far too long, palmed my face, hauled on the white cloth of my chiton and dug their fingers into the gaps between my skin and the beaten bronze breastplate given to me by the Gadfly. My own shadow took me in its hands, and it dragged me down. Down, into the depths.

Down, to my knees.

Fight. Until the last man falls.

I planted my right hand flat against the ground, a finger’s width all that separated my knees from the earth. The veins in my arm bulged from the strain. The shadowed hands that had pulled me down shifted their grip, settling on my shoulders and pressing. I dug my fingers into the dirt, snarling my effort.

“I am a raven,” I said, accepting the head rush of an ideal faithfully followed and inhaling sharply as my midnight cloak roiled and pressed up against the grasping hands. I took that strength, the Greek exceptionalism within my soul, and I flooded my body with it. Muscles flexed. I rose - but glacially slow. Too slow. My eyes narrowed. “And I am an unkindness-“

“I am a soldier.”

My knees slammed to the ground. The midnight veil was torn from my face. Torn away by a man that could not possibly have the hands to do it.

I’d seen him lose those hands.

A dull keening fought my heart’s thunderous beating for prominence in my senses. The man’s eyes narrowed in disgust at the sight of me, and he reared back his other hand. A flash of blinding light and a deafening pain nearly drowned out the crack of the vine-staff breaking my left cheek bone. The blow threw me back, away from the dead man, and into the arms of yet more merciless shadows.

“What-?” I breathed, but another set of hands slammed down onto my face and covered my mouth.

“As a soldier, I swore to faithfully execute all that the Captain commanded - and so I fought.” The soldier’s voice echoed in my ears, countless others speaking with him and over him at the same time. The same words, all of them. My heart stuttered in my chest.

“I swore to never desert my service, and so I stood my ground instead.”

No.

“I swore not to seek the avoidance of death for the Roman republic. And so I died,” the First Spear of the Fifth Legion spoke, every word a harder flogging than any vine-staff could deliver. Every word hit harder than the last, because I recognized them. I knew them. I had received them, personally, three thousand times before.

The sacramentum militare.

“These oaths we swore to you, and not once did we stray.” The first spear reared back his boot while the men of his cohort pressed and pulled me down. “But what of you?”

The senior-most centurion of the Fifth Legion buried his boot in my gut and flung me back. I rolled and gagged, vomiting blood on the ashen earth-

Ashen.

I heaved and looked up and around me, at a field of rolling hills and broken shields. I looked further up, at the roiling black clouds of heaven above, and saw they weren’t clouds at all. They were crows. Thousands upon thousands of them, wheeling through the skies and cawing ravenously.

In the distance, I heard the howling of wolves.

“What of the captain?” A different dead man asked. A whip cracked against my back and tore the raven’s midnight cloak along with the flesh beneath it. I grunted, lurching forward. “What of Roma’s favored son? What of your vows?”

A boy’s voice rose above the rest.

My voice.

“This soldier swears that he shall faithfully execute all that the General commands,” I heard myself swear, less than a decade and more than a lifetime ago. The whip cracked a second time, striking the back of my head and flinging me to the dirt. The men of the Fifth spat on my back and pressed me down.

When I managed to raise my head again, I found myself in what remained of the General’s tent. It was nothing but a ring of broken stakes and mangled scraps of tent cloth now. The cot was in pieces, the sand table overturned in the mud. All that remained intact was a humble wooden chest. The chest that the General sat while about his business.

“Have you done as he commanded?” The Fifth Legion’s senior logistico, the wise man of war that Gaius had taken from his own favored legion to guide me, twisted my ear and wrenched my head to the side. “Did you listen?”

Fight. Fight until the last man falls.

“I-“

“Be silent.”

The dead man flung me out of the tent and I landed in the sea. The water was colder than any mediterranean sea could be. The shock of it stole my breath from my lungs, made my body’s instincts betray me and gasp for air where there was only salt water. I choked and kicked at the hands yanking at my heels. I reached, precariously, breaking through the water and catching the wood of a ship’s rail. I pulled myself up, even as fingers dug and clawed at my fingertips and sought to pry them from the rail.

“This soldier swears that he shall never desert the service.”

Coughing up seawater and heaving for breath, I looked upon the battered deck of all that remained of Rome’s navy. A shattered mast and a sail ruined by blades and arrowheads. All around, for spans and spans in every direction, Roman warships groaned and sank beneath the waves. No matter where I looked, there was no land to be seen. Nothing to be heard but the cawing of crows above, and the distant howling of wolves.

“Have you moved on?” The magister of waves asked me, perched atop his last sinking ship’s broken mast. He had a hand ballista cradled propped up on his thigh. The tip of its bolt was leveled at my heart. “Or are you still a legion man?”

“I’m-“

The string released and I lunged sideways. The ballista’s bolt punched struck the flesh beneath my left shoulder instead of my heart. I tumbled back over the edge of the ship, bleeding freely.

I landed in the mud. The howling of wolves wasn’t distant anymore.

“This soldier swears that he shall not seek to avoid death for the Roman republic!”

The sacramentum militare was a holy Roman oath. Beneath the light of raging heaven, it bound the man to the legion. If ever broken, it rendered him sacer - given to the gods.

Thy heart and soul for Rome.

I raised my head.

The Fifth Legion stared accusingly back at me.

Scattered and broken, their throats torn out and their armor cratered into their own broken bodies. The dead and the dying. The victims of my one and only campaign. Some of them had no eyes left at all, but I felt their glares regardless.

“Captain of Salt and Ash,” a guttural, growling voice tore through the howling and the chatter of crows. “Have you avoided your righteous end?”

I shouted and surged up, planting my feet and struggling to rise. My fingers dug into the mud and found the haft of my spear. I strained with everything I had to bring it up.

“You owe your men a death,” the Carthaginian hound spoke. Lectured me.

“I intend to pay them,” I said furiously, left arm trembling as I forced it up while the hands of a dozen armored legionaries sought to press it down.

“Come then. Stand, if you can. Kill me, if you can. It won’t matter in the end - not in this place.”

I seethed. “In here, out there, it doesn’t matter. I’ll kill you twice.” I lunged.

I fell.

“You owe your men a proper death.” The dog of heaven stalked away while the men of the Fifth piled onto me one-by-one. Weighing me down and pressing my face into the mud.

“Why!?” I thrashed, abandoning my attempts to rise and focusing all of my efforts, all that remained, on holding on to my spear. “The enemy is there! Punish me when the dogs are dead. Try me in the courthouse of their broken city, condemn me overtop their corpses! Our work isn’t done!” If I had a weapon, I could still fight. If I drew another breath, I could still fight. If-

The first spear took my weapon in hand and tore it from my grasp.

“Our,” he repeated. His scorn made my skin crawl. “Our. As if you’re one of us. As if you’re the Captain that we called you. As if you’re any Roman at all.”

The soldiers that had helped raise me took me by the shoulders and threw me up against a wall of charred brick. It cracked and fell apart, infirm already, and I tumbled through the rubble.

Around me, the city of Rome burned.

“‘I am Roman,’” one of five thin-strip tribunes hissed in my ear, the young officer slamming a knife through the back of my knee while I struggled to rise. I bit down on an agonized sound and put my weight on the other leg.

“‘And I am Greek.’” A second thin-stripe finished the quote, hammering his own dagger into the back of my other knee. Both men, junior officers that were nonetheless years my seniors, twisted their knives and condemned me in synchronicity.

“I am both of those things,” I said, my voice raw with pain and heated weakness. “I am both, but I am Roman first! First, before, and above all else!”

“You are nothing. You are no one.”

I bared my teeth and called upon the captain’s virtue-

And saw stars. Stars and fallen statuary. Bricks, shards of painted clay, the remains of fallen columns - a build had collapsed overtop of my head. I struggled to clench my fist, even so.

Gravita-

Knees and elbows and unforgiving fists.

“Your father was a good man,” a veteran legionary lamented, forcing my head down. I recognized his voice, picked it out of the hundred others speaking the same words overtop of it. His name was Calvus. He’d served in the same cohort as my father, before my father became the Fifth’s captain.

“Your uncle was a great man,” Gaius’ senior logistico mourned, forcing the length of a whip between my teeth when I tried to bite through the fingers holding me down. Bridling me like a horse.

“You are neither of those men,” the first spear condemned me, as frank as he had ever been. He knelt and met my glare with wrathful disappointment. “And you are neither of those things. You can play along, that’s true enough. The Greeks taught you well, and you studied Caesar close enough to act the part that he assigned you. But you aren’t a captain. You aren’t one of ours. You never were, and even now you can’t recognize it - because the East has overtaken the portion of your soul that could.”

It was a struggle to speak around the whip. I tried. He shook his head and gave me the vine-staff again.

“We respected your father. We believed in Caesar. But we loved you.”

My eyes went wide.

“And what did we receive for our love?”

“You swore to execute the General’s commands,” a young man whispered, nearly as young as me. His eyes were torn out and the flesh of his mangled throat parted like half-opened curtains every time he inhaled and exhaled. “You swore. So why did you stop fighting!?”

“I didn’t,” I said hoarsely. He spat at me.

“You swore to never desert the service,” another snapped. “Yet here you are, entire worlds away. Sailing further east every day!”

“I have to get stronger.”

“In the Greek way,” the First Spear spoke disdainfully, and stomped the middle of my back, forcing me back down. “Where Caesar and all his legions failed, you alone will triumph. You alone are worth more than Roma and all of her legions.”

“No!” I pounded my fists against the broken cobble streets. “That isn’t what I’m saying-!”

“It’s what you mean.”

A strain was building in my spine.

“In Greece or in Thracia, wherever your barbarians take you, a captain may be something else. But in Roma, a captain gives more than he takes!” The first spear slammed his vine-staff over my back, and the men of his cohort roared their approval. “You strut through the East while your soldiers rot in salted fields and have the audacity to brag about having led them! As if you earned that honor! As if it were yours!”

The man that had saved Caesar’s life personally on the battlefield struck me again with his martial instrument. The man that had earned the epitaph Virgus, the Staff, struck me with the implement of his discipline.

Sextius Baculus, the First Spear that had struggled the most of any man to make up for my lack as Captain of the Fifth Legion, struck me a fourth and final time - and broke his vine-staff over my back.

“You think you can be a better Greek than you were a Roman? By all means, show us.”

They waited while I gagged and wheezed. When I finally managed to suck in a breath, I could barely manage a word.

“How?”

“How does any Greek begin their journey? Any cultivator at all?” Three thousand hands laid themselves upon my shoulders, and then three thousand more.

“Stand,” the Fifth Legion commanded me, pressing down with all their might. I struggled and strained worthlessly. I couldn’t even raise my knees from the rubble.

They threw me through toppled buildings and fountains of ash-tainted water. I rolled to a stop in the middle of the Forum. Before the Twelve Tables, or what remained of them.

“Stand under your own power!” Six thousand hands clamped down again, pressing, pushing, crushing.

I screamed my effort to the crow-blackened skies and pushed back with everything I had. I rose a fraction, a hairsbreadth, before the strain in my spine turned to searing pain and my knees slammed back to the earth.

“We bolstered you,” the Fifth thundered, in my ears and all the world around me. “From the day your father died until the day we left to join him, you stood under our power. You took from us, and all we had we gave to you!”

I howled until my voice cracked and broke apart. I dug my fingers and toes through stone in search of purchase, tore the nails from them as I scrabbled and strained for leverage. At an unspoken signal, all three thousand of them drove my head through the cobbled stones and then heaved me up, into the air, before driving me back down.

“You swore you’d die for Rome’s republic, yet here you are. Alive.”

“Until the work is done,” I rasped, delirious with pain. “The work-”

“There is no work! There is no Rome any longer - you failed! You lost!”

“Even so-“

“STAND.”

“I can’t.” I clenched my eyes stubbornly against the building heat. I whispered the words hoarsely, like a prayer. We don’t weep until the battle is won.

“You can’t. You couldn’t. You never will.”

Three thousand dead men slammed a gladius hilt-first into the rubble so that its gleaming blade pointed to heaven. The metal was polished and gleaming. Unmarred by war. Untested and untempered.

No. Not yet.

“You reaped the rewards of your father’s service without any of his efforts,” the man that had served in my father’s first cohort judged me. “You stood on our shoulders and called yourself our captain. Made us carry your weight, while we languished with our own.”

“No longer. It’s your turn to bear it.”

The Fifth Legion pulled me to my feet one last time. The gladius’ blade gleamed beneath me.

“You’re going to carry that weight.”

The weight of three thousand worlds fell upon my shoulders all at once, and I went blind from the pain. I felt the ground crack, brick crumbling to dust beneath my heels. My knees shook, and the agony in my spine doubled. Redoubled again. I felt something crack inside of me, hairline fractures running along the pneumatic channels forged by the Rein-Holder’s marrow.

“All you’ve ever done is fall,” the legion that raised me spoke, each of them as one. With a synchronicity that I could not match, because I was no part of them anymore - if I’d ever been at all. “If that’s all there is to you, then fall. If you can’t stand like a Captain, then the least you can do is fall like one.”

“No,” I groaned, straining beneath the weight of three thousand broken soldiers.

“You want to be Roman? You want to be ours? Then be what you claim to be! Be a Captain, for once and never again! What does a Captain do when he loses his legion!?”

They pressed me down further. A finger’s length at a time. Their hands pressed and their fingers clawed at whatever they could grasp. I resisted with all that I had, and then more after that.

Not yet.

They howled and raged. Rome fell. “If not in life, then in death - die. Die a Captain’s death!”

Not until the work was done.

“FALL ON YOUR SWORD.”

Light bloomed in the darkness of the fallen city. The crows above cried out and screamed as their wings were burnt and their frail bodies broken, their fragile flesh fried by lightning currents. Scavengers plummeted from the sky.

Griffon lunged up from my shadow and grabbed me by the shoulders. The mutilated shadows of the Fifth reached out for him, and he struck them down with twice as many searing hands. Some of them burned, some of them crackled with fierce lightning, but every pankration hand glowed.

“Arrogant mongrel corpses. Don’t touch my brother.”

The Scarlet Son of Alikos kicked the captain’s gladius out of the rubble and spat phlegm into the Fifth Legion’s eyes before pulling me back down into my shadow.

Then up and out of it.

§

We emerged from the shadows and delirium, in the Orphic House once more.

I sagged, head falling back limply as darkness encroached from every corner-

Griffon slapped me hard across the face.

“Are you out of your mind?” he demanded wrathfully, tearing the midnight veil from his face and glaring furiously into my eyes. “Demons within. Were the ones that tore down your city not enough for you?”

I moved my lips, but I didn’t have the strength to give the words the breath required. He snarled and shook me by the shoulders, before turning and throwing me up against a wagon-wood support beam. It cracked and groaned, bending dangerously.

“Have you forgotten what we came here to do? Have you forgotten what lies ahead?” He gripped me by the chin, his pneuma blazing through the uninhabited Orphic House. His pankration hands seized benches and chairs and tore them apart, tossed them at the walls and up into the rafters in his fury. “You can’t afford indecision anymore! You have to choose, Sol.”

“Choose?” I rasped, struggling to stand. Under my own power, for once in my life. My limbs felt heavier than they ever had before. The weight on my shoulders was more punishing now than I could ever remember it being.

“You’ve stood stagnant since the day your legion fell,” Griffon said, scarlet eyes boring into mine. “The path ahead is forked and you’ve wasted a year of your life trying to walk both roads. You have to pick one. I don’t care which it is anymore. Be a Roman if you’re a Roman. Be a Greek if you’re a Greek. But pick one! Pick one path and walk it! Show me conviction!”

Griffon all thirty of his pankration hands and banished the shadows from the Orphic House.

“Show me Sol!”

I admired the men that raised me, each of them for different things. My father for his pure and unshakeable tenacity. Aristotle for his wisdom and his way with spoken words. Gaius for the weight he carried on his shoulders, always, like it wasn’t there at all.

But no matter how many times I’d tried to deny it since that night a year ago, the truth of it remained.

No one had ever inspired me like Griffon could.

We forced open the horn gates of the Orphic House and staggered out into the frigid winter air, our breath clouding like steam as it left our mouths. Griffon abruptly stopped before the first wooden step, and I planted the tip of my celestial spear in the wood to halt my own momentum, straining against the weight on my shoulders and the infirmity of my wounds.

Griffon stared down the steps in disbelief.

“What.”

Three horses we had given to the Thracian gatekeepers in exchange for admittance to their holy house. One horse had been offered to the earth. The docile mare that I’d originally picked out, before passing her on to Selene and then Scythas, lay dead in the snow with a bleeding axe wound in her neck. A second sacrifice had been attempted after that.

It had failed.

The black stallion and Griffon’s white mare stood over the crumpled corpses of the Thracian gatekeepers, each of their muzzles drenched with human blood. As we watched, aghast, Griffon’s slender runner dipped her head and took a dainty bite out of the Thracian woman’s thigh. The cause of the woman’s death was impossible to miss, her skull split open like an overripe fruit and its contents scattered across the snow-covered steps. The man’s cause of death was as apparent - there was a crater in his chest, his ribs broken and curling away from a central point of trauma like the limbs of a spider.

The culprit behind both deaths raised his black head from the man’s corpse, bone cracking between his teeth as the stallion chewed. He had an axe wound on his left flank, near his neck, but it didn’t seem to bother him much. Wrathful golden eyes might mine, brighter than they had been before we entered the Orphic House. He snorted, and the steam that rose from his nostrils and mouth was thicker than what came from ours. I felt the heat from the top of the steps.

“Griffon,” I spoke, my voice like shifting gravel. “Remind me how an animal refines itself.”

Slowly, the Scarlet Son began to smile.

“The same way we do,” he said, stepping down the first step. His bright white runner whinnied softly, eyes burning with a curious anticipation that reminded me of Sorea. “They eat.”

He leapt off the steps and his mare bolted. At the same moment, the stallion reared up on two legs, lashing out with monstrous strength at the airborne Greek.

My bronze spear struck the stallion in his side. It staggered him just long enough for Griffon to shoot past, whooping in glee to match the starlight mare’s spirited whinnying. The midnight warhorse recovered in the beat of a single moment and screamed a challenge up the steps at me.

I place one foot on the stairs and immediately fell through them.

“Your name is Atlas,” I declared, prying the rickety wooden boards up and tossing them aside. Steam seethed through the stallion’s teeth at my presumption. I advanced through the snow, one painful step at a time. “You and I are going to bring raging heaven down on the city of Carthage.”

The midnight charger tossed his head and dug furrows through the frozen earth. A refusal if I had ever seen one.

I inhaled slowly.

“I wasn’t asking.”

Atlas charged, and I moved to meet him.

1.94 [Selene]

A guttural crack split the silence of the sunset domain in the Raging Heaven Cult. The Tyrant Polyzalus, reclining on a feather-down bed with his comatose wife tucked against his side and breathing rhythmically, returned to full alertness in an instant. He sat up abruptly, staring in disbelief at the far corner of the room. Another crack wrenched away the sunset silence.

And then, all at once, the marble statue of the Heroine Selene broke apart and tumbled in pieces to the floor.

Selene

Cultivators had a reputation for fearlessness.

In many ways, it was well-earned. In the course of their journey, a cultivator’s refinement steadily uplifted them body and soul in a way that put most common worries beneath them. An unrefined mortal feared the bite of a knife because they knew their body was a fragile thing and prone to failure. A cultivator in the Civic Realm could hone their body and suffer the damage gracefully, survive long enough to seek a physician or even close the wound themselves if they had the proper control. A Sophic cultivator worth their rank could survive almost any mundane gouge, assuming the knife could pierce their skin at all.

Beyond the mortal realms of cultivation, where men and women transcended the limitations of their feeble humanity - if only in the smallest of parts - mundane wounds were so far beneath their notice that many forgot they had ever been a cause for concern in the first place. Why should a Hero fear a stabbing in a back alley, when their body had already weathered the blows of monsters and virtuous beasts and their own fellow legends without faltering? How could a Tyrant fear the stopping of their heart, when they had already given it up for their coronation?

It was all too easy to forget that even the greatest of them had been fragile flesh and blood at one point or another in their lives. As a man became further refined, it became more and more difficult for him to empathize with the concerns of the crude men languishing at the foot of the divine mountain. As a woman laid the foundations and raised the pillars of her ego within her soul, the subjugations that unrefined women crept through night time streets in fear of seemed as distant to her as the clouds in heaven above.

They simply didn’t understand. The scope was too small.

Of course, the opposite also tended to be true.

§

“The daughter of the First Son to Burn is afraid of the dark. The daughter of the oracle whose majesty illuminates the furthest corners of whatever room she steps into fears a world without light. The Fates do love their little ironies, don’t they?”

“You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”

“And look. I’m not laughing, am I? Now, if I’d been there to see your father spit blood when he first discovered this little affliction-“

“It isn’t little! And Átta doesn’t know.”

“Ho? He really will choke on his own biles if he finds out you came to me first, you know.”

“You can’t tell him.”

“I can do whatever I want, girl.”

“Don’t tell him! Please!”

“Fine, fine. Your heart will be the one to bear the secret’s weight. Now why did you come to me with this?”

“I didn’t… I didn’t used to be afraid of the dark.”

“Is that so? And when did it start?”

“After your bee stung me. When I started having those dreams.”

“Go on.”

“You said treating it with honey would make it go away-“

“And it did. All that remains of that putrid wound is a scar the size of a stinger’s tip.”

“But the dreams didn’t stop! They only got worse.”

“Worse?”

“They didn’t make sense before, b-but after the honey… they’re scary now.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t like it.”

“Describe them.”

“No!”

“Why?”

“Because I hate them! They’re scary, and they hurt! I don’t want to talk about them, and I don’t want to think about them - I don’t want to go to sleep and I don’t want to close my eyes! I-I’m even scared to blink! Like I’m just some little girl-”

“You are a little girl.”

“No I’m not! I’m a cultivator. I’m refined. I shouldn’t have to talk about these things. I shouldn’t be afraid of anything at all.”

“Cultivators can’t be afraid? Is that what you think?”

“Átta isn’t afraid of anything.”

“I can assure you that isn’t true. Everyone fears something in the end - even your father.”

“Even you?”

“Even me.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“An empty cup. Quickly, girl, deliver me from my fear. When you get back, we’ll see about delivering you from yours.”

§

Fallen into a world of unbroken shadows, Selene couldn’t see the Hero of the Scything Squall. But she could hear him.

It was less helpful than it might have been.

“Get away,” he hissed, and though the sound of it came from her direct right, Selene only grasped empty air when her arm whipped out to grab him.

“Scythas,” she hissed right back, knowing that even if she was facing the opposite way he would hear her. “You aren’t well. Let me help you.”

“Fuck you.”

She had been foolish to toss him down into the coffin’s dark chasm. The impact at the end of their fall hadn’t been enough to meaningfully harm cultivators of their standing, but it had been enough to wake the delirious Hero from the daze her headbutt had put him under. In the bare second that had separated their descent, he’d escaped from her reach and evaded her ever since.

Her heart’s flame couldn’t pierce these shadows. And now the wind was against her, too. She was blind. Worse, she couldn’t trust her ears. Until this was over, her other senses would have to do. Before they could help Solus and Griffon, they needed to escape. Before they could escape, she had to return the Hero to his senses.

She needed honey.

Selene navigated the dark caverns beneath the earth with the only senses she could trust. She cast off her sandals so that her bare feet could grip the cool, slick rocks beneath them and feel their minute shifting as she walked. She inhaled deeply with each breath, through her mouth as well as her nose, tasting and scenting for anything beyond the damp smell of subterranean stone. Her refined senses were all but worthless to her, unfortunately. Her civic sense for pneuma was curiously numb, her sophic sense finding no trace of another’s influence no matter how far she cast it out.

As for her heroic sense. Well.

“Don’t look at me,” the Hero snapped, shielding his cracked and bleeding heart from her with howling gales of wind. Selene tucked her chin and hunched her shoulders, gripping the slick stone with her toes as best she could while the breeze buffeted her from alternating angles. It sought to knock her off her feet. She wouldn’t let it.

“Your heart is not your own, cultivator,” she warned him for the second time since she had known him. She couldn’t hear herself speak, but she knew he would. She grit her teeth and pressed forward. Another blind step. Another deep breath.

“It’s yours now, is that it?” Scythas spat, his voice echoing from all around her. “I refuse. You can’t have it. You can’t have me.”

Selene heard the screams of violated souls on the wind. She heard the whistle of blades cutting through the air, and the grotesque noise of their impact in frail human flesh. She heard the snarls of beasts and the sound of limbs being torn from their sockets. She heard anguish in the repetition of heavy breath and the rhythm of flesh impacting flesh.

She heard the end of all things in the howling of the wind.

Selene didn’t fear the dark. Not anymore.

But she still despised it.

§

“The dark is a silly thing to fear.”

“Not as silly as an empty cup.”

“Ah, but you don’t know why I fear an empty cup. I, on the other hand, know exactly why you fear the dark. That’s why I find it silly. And that’s how you overcome your fear.”

“?”

“By understanding it. You say your dreams don’t make any sense, and their contents frighten you - so understand them.”

“How?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re useless!”

“So I’m told. If understanding is impossible for the moment, there are other ways to overcome your fears.”

“Like what?”

“You could learn to live with them. Accept that your heart will race whenever you close your eyes, resign yourself every night to the fact that your dreams will be mad and frightening things. Know that cold sweat will wet your skin whenever you step into a darkened room. Brave it. Live your life regardless.”

“… I don’t like that way.”

“Well, I suppose there is another.”

“… What is it?”

“You can take your fear in hand. You can consume it.”

§

You can make it yours.

§

Selene tripped over a shaft of warm wood. She inhaled sharply, and the sweet scent of honey filled her nose. Its sweet tang coated her tongue.

The daughter of the Scarlet Oracle picked up her spear and pulled from its tip the beehive that she had skewered when she’d thrown it.

“I’m going to mend you now, cultivator,” she explained in a calm voice. Howling wind mingled with the echoing death throes of the fallen sun god in her ears. She closed her eyes and every one of her other senses, gripping her spear tight.

The pantheon was dead and gone. That was plain to see in every faceless statue and stricken holy text. Only epitaphs remained in place of names. Only echoes could be heard these days, even by an oracle.

But an echo of divinity was still itself divine.

As a woman both healthy and whole, Selene had five senses with which she could perceive the world. They were all useless here. As a cultivator in the third realm of Heroes, she had three senses more that she could use, each of them more refined than the last. They were useless as well.

As an Oracle, if only by blood, she had one more beyond that. An echo of a dead god’s perception. Another eye that stayed closed at all times. Unless, of course, she gave it a reason to open.

Selene bit into the beehive and swallowed down its chthonic honey. Her oracle’s eye cracked open a sliver.

She spun on her heel and lunged, spearing Scythas through the heart.

§

“Bakkhos.”

“That’s my name.”

“I have a question.”

“You usually do.”

“I lost another one today. A man twice my age and three times my size. He clung to my legs like I was his mother and begged me for an answer to his troubles while his insides tore themselves apart. He wanted me to cure him. He died.”

“Tragic.”

“Father told me it wasn’t my fault. It’s what he always tells me. ‘An oracle is only a messenger, Selene. It’s no fault of yours that some people need a mending far more than they need a message.’”

“I have yet to hear a question asked.”

“Years ago, you told me that I could take my fear in hand. You taught me that I could make it my own.”

“I did.”

“What about someone else’s fear? Their grief and their sorrows? Can I take those, too?”

“I’ve never seen it done.”

“So I can’t.”

“I didn’t say that.”

§

The gates of horn groaned and creaked open, and they tumbled out into the frigid Thracian night.

Scythas sank into the snow, staring up at the full moon above. His arms and neck were marred by angry red welts, each of them slathered in honey that shimmered gold in the pale moonlight. He had a satisfied smile on his face. It had been his abilities that guided them out in the end. He’d traced the familiar Thracian winds through the darkened underworld, all the way to their source - seeping through the cracks in the horn gates.

His eyes were clear, the flames within them burning brighter than they had at any point thus far in their Thracian venture. Those eyes flickered to her, wonder and appreciating brightening them further.

“What did you do to me?”

Selene raised an eyebrow. The Hero chuckled, pressing a palm to his forehead and shaking his head once.

“Right. What did you do for me?”

“I applied honey to your bee stings.” Apitherapy. The late kyrios’ favorite form of medicine, and the same method he’d used to treat her own bee sting so many years ago.

“That can’t be all,” Scythas said, clenching and unclenching his free hand into a fist and lifting his hips to kick idly at the night sky. “I don’t just feel like I did before. I feel better. I haven’t felt this good in my entire life. I feel like-”

“Like yourself.”

He snapped his fingers and smiled. “Exactly.”

Selene watched him sadly as he marveled at something that should have been a simple reality for him.

“I feel light as a feather,” he continued, twisting his body to and fro and whistling a little note that caught the falling snowflakes in the air and twisted them around in a dozen different strands of wind currents. “I feel good. Strong, and healthy.”

Like a hero.

“The honey will heal the welts,” Selene informed him, because she couldn’t bear the sight any longer. She had to tell him the truth of things. “But the rest of what you’re feeling is temporary. If you carry on as you did before, it will fade. You’ll go back to what you were before. It might be worse than before, knowing how far you’ve fallen from what you could be.”

The Hero Scythas sat straight up, panic warring with his good mood. “What? Why?”

Selene considered the moon above. The snowflakes as they whirled, each one a unique wonder.

“When was the last time you advanced, cultivator?” she asked him softly.

“… two years ago. From the tenth rank of the Sophic Realm to the first rank of the Heroic Realm.”

“Two years ago. And tell me, Scythas of the Scything Squall - was your ascension triumphant?”

“No,” he whispered.

It was said that tragedy was an inevitability in the course of a Hero’s journey. All that changed from legend to legend was whether that tragedy struck at the end of their Epic.

Or the beginning.

“Then it’s good you haven’t advanced since then.”

“Why?”

She hummed, running her fingers up and down the carved prophecies that decorated her spear. “Cultivation makes us more of what we already are. Good as well as bad. The further we refine ourselves, the more wondrous we seem to those that stand beneath us. Beyond a certain point, we grow larger than the largest non-cultivator could ever hope to be. We become stronger, and more beautiful, and wiser beyond the years of any mortal soul. But with triumph comes tragedy. And those pains advance alongside us just the same.”

A mortal man humiliated and ridiculed in the middle of a crowded agora might feel as if his world was falling out from under his feet, like his heart would hammer out of his chest at any moment, but in reality the worst that shame could generally do was invoke a cold sweat. Perhaps if the blow had truly cut him deep, it might ruin his appetite along with his mood.

A cultivator’s shame, like all the rest of their soul, was more than a non-cultivator’s. Their shame could do more than ruin their appetite and make them sweat. They could spit blood like they’d been run through with a sword if another’s words hit their ego in just the right place, at just the right time, among just the right people.

“You are standing in a dangerous place,” she informed him with as much weight as she could impart. She tried to make him understand. “The most dangerous place, in some ways. Every rank we advance, we become more than what we were before. Advancing through a realm, though - that adds more than just a layer to our soul. It deepens us. It makes us exponentially greater. And it makes our deviations exponentially more terrible.

“I’ve glimpsed a portion of what torments you,” she admitted, an apology as much as a confession. She’d had no choice. Once she stepped into another’s heart, their demons had a way of divulging things they would never speak to on their own. She could only nod at the panic and the shame that overtook the Hero as he realized what she had seen. “I’ve excised what I could from your heart, but I can’t reach the roots. I can’t stop it from growing back, more terrible than it was before. That’s something only you can do.”

Scythas swallowed. “And if I don’t?”

Selene closed her eyes. The constellations above were familiar to her, but subtly off. They had escaped the Orphic House’s ivory delusions, but they had not returned to the world in the same place that they had left it. The land around them looked like Thracia, but it wasn’t any portion of it that Selene had seen before.

“A deviation of the soul is what we call it when a cultivator loses their way. When we go against the truths and ideals that made us who we are, when we betray the desires and the deeds that drove us to the heights we so enjoy looked down from, we stray. And there are evils that lurk along the path to heaven.

“A Hero’s heart is what sets them apart from those both above and below them. For better and for worse. In triumph as well as tragedy. Standing at the nexus of refinement where one realm meets another is dangerous regardless of where exactly you stand - you have become something deeper than you were before, and you don’t yet fully understand what that means. Your woes are deeper in a way that you can’t grasp until they’ve sank their fangs into you. Luckily for you, your woes haven’t gotten their bearings yet either.”

“What are you saying?” Scythas asked her, frightened and confused. “You’re talking about my trauma like it’s a living thing, as if it can think and plot against me.”

She smiled bleakly. “I call them heart demons.”

“You call them what?”

Selene raised the chthonic hive to her lips without opening her eyes and took another bite out of its honeycombs. Her oracle eyes cracked open, just a sliver, and gazed upon the heavens above. Ah. The gates of horn had spit them out further afield than she’d thought.

“Then you’re saying,” Scythas began, the spark of divinity within his soul contorting in on itself in its confusion, “that… that once the demon understands its strength, it’ll use it? Against me?”

“The second most dangerous tribulation a cultivator faces is in the transcendence of realms,” she recited, a lesson she had learned years ago. A lesson she had seen reflected in dozens of pitiful men and women, groveling at a girl’s feet in search of salvation. “Whether it’s a tribulation of lightning or something else entirely, citizen to sophist, sophist to hero, hero to tyrant - the chasm is endlessly deep and the leap that must be made to cross it is perilously long.”

“And the most dangerous?” Scythas asked quietly, though he already knew.

She answered anyway. “The very next one.”

In every realm of cultivation, the most common ranks for a cultivator’s journey to end at were the first and the last.

§

In a shadowed grove of Orphic mystery, the hungry raven known as Solus advanced to the second rank of the Sophic Realm-

And choked as a hand rose up from his shadow and clamped its fingers around his throat.

The hungry raven known as Griffon lunged across the grove, reaching out for the Roman while he snarled and fought his own shadow. A dozen more arms reached up from Solus’ shadow and gripped his head, his shoulders, and his arms. Pulling him. Dragging him down.

The raven from Rome sank into his own shadow.

He vanished.

1.93 [Selene]

Selene

They panicked.

The ivory gates had spat them out into an underground tomb, a beehive tholos with only the central coffin and its ivory shroud to fill the space. Scythas rounded on the gates and wrenched at them again as soon as he realized what he was looking at, and Selene turned to help him. The gates fought and groaned, but they got them open again. Hero and Heroine slipped back through the same way they’d come.

Instead of stepping back into the empty Orphic House, though, they found themselves in another beehive tomb.

“What is this?” Scythas demanded. Not so much talking to her as he was the ivy-covered coffin in the center of the tomb. “What do you want?”

Something stirred in the shadows behind the coffin at the words spoken in the kyrios’ voice. Selene inhaled sharply.

A low buzzing noise rose up from the dark. Selene turned and drove her shoulder into the gates they’d just crossed through, stoking her heart’s flame while it hammered away in rising panic. The gates groaned open. Scythas whistled a terse note and moved to confront the sound behind the shadows-

Selene grabbed him by the faded green scarf around his neck and yanked him through the open gates.

The Hero of the Hurricane Heights hit the ground and rolled, gagging. He held his neck, looking up at her incredulously.

“Why?”

Another underground tomb. Selene cast around, peering through the shadows with every one of her mortal and refined senses.

“How much did you know of the kyrios and his interests?” she asked him, creeping warily into the tomb. She pulled her spear of holly and bronze from the folds in her sunray silks, its carved prophecies catching the light of her eyes and shifting in quasi shadow motion.

Scythas coughed and cleared his throat, pushing himself up with a hand. “More than I wanted to. Less than I could have.”

That sounded about right. Exasperation joined unease in her heart.

“Did you know that he cultivated his own honey?” she asked. The pretty Hero blinked.

“He was a beekeeper?”

“The first of them,” she confirmed. “Or first among them. He was always so drunk when he spoke of it, it was hard to tell exactly what he meant. But yes, he kept his own hives. Dozens of them, wherever he could find a dark and damp enough space to fit one. Do you know why?”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t for the honey,” Scythas muttered, rising to his feet and pulling his sword from its sheathe. He held it firmly, in a proper grip, but somehow the image of it in his hand was wrong. The Hero eased away from the ivy-covered coffin she had nearly tossed him straight into, joining her in casting around for movement in the dark.

“It was for the honey.” She smiled briefly at his confused glance. “It’s just that along with the honey came other… marvels.” The kyrios had called them blessings. When her father had spoken of the kyrios’ buzzing hives to her, he had labeled them curses.

It was no coincidence that the cracks and crevices that riddled the darkened caverns of the earth were so often filled by combs of gold and the buzzing drone of nature’s honey makers. In the same caves and dark places that served as gateways to what lay beneath, it was not uncommon to find bees and their hives. The kyrios had explained to her once, intoxicated as he tended to be, that each bee was the soul of a son or a daughter that was yet to be born. He had explained to her their chthonic nature, and the place they occupied within his domain.

Pacing around the room, Selene idly rubbed her thumb against a faint pinprick of a scar on the tip of her index finger.

“Once, when I was too young to climb onto my scarlet tripod without someone else first lifting me up, the kyrios showed me one of the hives he kept in his estate.” She strained for any distant sound, any flicker of beating wings and little bobbing bodies in the shadows, but found none. The hand that had her heart in a vice slowly began to loosen its grip. “It was in a corner of a room deep within his quarters, bereft of anything else. Cold and damp.”

Above, at the highest point of the faux-vaulting ceiling of the beehive tomb, she heard a faint buzz. Rearing back her spear, she heaved it with everything she had straight up. The moment before it left her hand, the scarlet glow of her eyes rushed up the length of the spear’s shaft and filled every carved groove in the wood. The glowing prophecies lit up the tomb as the spear shot straight up-

And vanished. Gone, to somewhere else. In the brief moment before the spear disappeared from her senses, they saw the coming swarm.

“Out!” she shouted, and they each leapt for the ivory gates.

§

“A pair of mad men are having an argument-“

“Exchanging discourse, you mean?”

“If you’d like to call it that. Each of them believes they are the greater king and that the other is their lesser. One of them is ruler of a grand marble city, and the other commands the shadows that lurk in every corner that the light won’t touch. Tell me, girl - which of their domains is greater, and which of them is lesser?”

“The first one is greater. He’s king of an entire city and the other one is only king of shadows - that’s the same as being king of nothing at all.”

“Incorrect.”

“What!”

“The first man is king of only one humble city. Within its borders he reigns supreme, but only within its borders. The second man is king of every shadow, in every kingdom and beyond them, too. The domain that can be marked on a map is ever less. The domain that exists in every corner, no matter how small a part, is always more.”

“But they’re only shadows!”

“Shadows, and whatever those shadows contain. The king of a marble city is king of all that resides within his domain. The king of shadows is just the same. All that persists in the shade is his to command - like these bees here.”

“Even the bees?”

“Even the bees. Here - beckon with a finger, and see if one comes.”

“As if a bee would listen.”

“Is that so? Well, look what happens when I beckon one.”

“Wha-!”

“I called him, and so he came. Have you ever seen a honeybee rest like this on the finger of a man?”

“… maybe.”

“Ho? Cheeky girl. In that case, have you ever seen one dance?”

“!”

“From thumb to pinky, then index and ring. To the middle he returns, the center of his fingerling stage. Go on, clap for him. He put on quite a show - just listen to him buzz.”

“How do you know it’s a boy?”

“I’m looking at his soul. He’ll be a handsome thing when he’s born again, someday.”

“Born again? As a person?”

“Of course. That’s what every bee is, after all. An unborn soul. It’s why they buzz around in my shadows, straddling the line between life and death.”

“So that bee will be a baby someday?”

“He would have been, yes.”

“AH! You- what are you doing!? Why are you squishing him!?”

“Because I can. See how he doesn’t sting me, even now? Do you know why that is?”

“I don’t care, just let him go- ow!”

“Ah. You killed him.”

“… why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did he sting me?”

“Because he was fearful and in pain, and I wouldn’t allow him to sting me.”

“B-but…”

“None of that. It’s only a bee sting. Nothing worth crying over.”

“What’s going to happen to his soul?”

“The same thing that’s going to happen to yours.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it’s time for you to fetch me another drink. Quickly now. I won’t be here forever.”

§

“The shadows aren’t safe,” Selene whispered harshly, balling up her fists and punching the sloping walls of yet another beehive tomb as hard as she could. She had seen what a punch was supposed to look like, in the boxing events at the Olympic Games and in the memories of those that came to her for guidance. She knew her form wasn’t what it could have been.

Still, even her sloppy punches should have been enough to shatter these glossy brick walls. It shouldn’t have felt like she was still a girl too young to sleep alone at night, unrefined and lacking strength. It shouldn’t have felt like her hands would break long before the tholos’ smooth masonry, and yet it did. After a few more jabs she gave it up and wedged her fingers into the thin gaps between the finely cut bricks, trying to pry them out one at a time. All she got for her troubles were broken nails and bleeding fingers.

“It’s all shadows,” Scythas whispered, just as harshly, abruptly by her side and pulling her hands away from the bricks. His eyes were wide, the white lit up by golden coals. “It’s all shadows, Selene.“ It was the first time he’d called her by her name. “Why isn’t it safe? Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know-?” His head suddenly cocked, hearing it a moment before she did. The bees.

Scythas growled in frustration and rushed after her, back to the gates.

§

They fled. From tomb to tomb, beehive to beehive, each one just different enough to be distinguished from the one that came before it and the one that followed after.

One of them was covered wall-to-wall with stone-carved women in bombastic curling skirts, each of their arms raised entreatingly up to heaven - or whatever it was that lay above the subterranean tomb. Piles of golden buttons spilled over and out of the pots and chests settled around the room to contain them.

Another had painted walls, a grand fresco overlooking the tomb’s ivy-covered coffin. The painting showed a depiction of a wild boar, two faceless men attacking the beast from either side. One of them hunted on horseback with spear in hand. The other was naked, and rearing a double-sided axe up over his head to swing.

They fled through tombs filled with gilded breastplates and the bones of horses, beds of granite and the remains of stone-ring fire pits. They passed frescos of every color and subject depiction, plants and animals and men and women. They tripped and stumbled over full sets of ornate silver horse armor. They passed through a tomb supported by a single marble column of the Doric design, with a stone sun disc casting shadows instead of light from the top of it.

They fled.

And they were followed.

Time seemed to pass, but there was no way to really tell. When Selene finally collapsed with her back against the ivy shroud of yet another coffin, she couldn’t tell if it was the panic or the fatigue that had made her limbs feel heavier than lead and filled her head with fog. Scythas collapsed next to her, sweat-slicked and panting harshly. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the ivy, inhaling slowly.

The wind whistled as he breathed it in, and in a single breath the frantic rise and fall of his chest slowed. When the Hero opened his eyes they were not any less panicked than they had been before, but he had caught his breath if nothing else. A quirk of his city, she supposed.

“We can’t run forever,” he told her.

As if she didn’t know.

She saw a flicker in the dark, and forced herself to move.

§

Scythas tried to fight them. To his credit, he put on quite a show.

But in the end, he was only swinging blindly in the dark.

“So what if they catch us?” he asked her, panting again. It took him longer to realize it this time, and when he did he spat a curse before invoking the wind to replenish him. “So what if we get stung a few times? They’re only bees.”

Some time later, a dozen tombs and as many minutes- or perhaps hours - after he’d asked the question, a stray honey maker stung him while he was swinging madly at the shadows. Selene didn’t see it happen. She only heard him grunt in surprise and saw him stumble back with a baffled expression. Whatever his eyes were looking at in that moment, it wasn’t the tomb that they were in. The back of his legs hit the ivy-covered coffin and he tumbled over it onto the dirt floor.

Selene slung his arm over her shoulder and dragged him through the ivory gates.

§

“It’s still hurting, hm?”

“Just a little.”

“That’s not what your father said. To hear him tell it, you could lose that finger any day now.”

“Átta worries too much.”

“Or perhaps not enough. He sent you back to me, after all.”

“Only because you won’t let him take me away.”

“Smart girl. Come, show me the finger.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“I thought it hurt a little?”

“Hmph.”

“What a ghastly sight. And the finger looks bad, too.”

“Hmph!”

“It’s good that he sent you back. This wouldn’t have healed on its own.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“But it was only a bee sting.”

“Even a bee has its venom. And the bee that did this was one of mine, you know. I cultivated his hive myself, with my own two hands. Everything about his hive was greater than it would have been without my hand to guide its growth. Its honey was sweeter and more fragrant than any other, and its queen was fertile enough to fill a dozen more hives with all of her children. In the same way, the hive’s warriors were greater than any you could find in the wild. Their stingers were sharper, and their venom twice and twice again more fearsome.”

“Could I have… died?”

“With that father of yours watching over you? I doubt it. But you certainly would have suffered if you’d let it fester much longer. My bees have venom that can addle the mind. Generally it takes a greater dose, or a longer span of time, but you’re small enough that I had wondered if you’d feel its effects. Fortunate for you that you didn’t.”

“…”

“Oh? Am I wrong?”

“… Last night… I had a strange dream.”

“What sort of dream?”

“It was silly. It didn’t make any sense, and it was so loud-“

“My girl, those are my favorite kinds of dreams. Tell me all about it.”

§

“Selene,” the Hero Scythas slurred, his eyes glassy and distant. She pressed the back of her hand against his forehead. It was hot enough to scald a mortal’s skin. “Slne…”

“Yes?” she murmured, pulling what she could from the folds in her silks. A clay jug of water and a cloth, a tied bundle of cloth containing goat cheese and grapes.

“Don’t feel well,” he murmured. His eyes rolled in his head. She reached out to dab with the damp cloth at his forehead, and he abruptly flinched. Lashed out, knocking the jug of water to the floor and shattering it. “Don’t touch me!”

He snarled like an animal, looking through her like she wasn’t there. Like there was someone else behind her.

When she looked back, all she saw was the bees.

“It’s time to go,” Selene said urgently, tossing the rag down on top of the clay shards. “Up! Up!”

“No,” he hissed. There were dozens of welts on the skin of his arms and legs now, dozens of bee stings that Selene hadn’t been fast enough to pull him away from.

We can’t run forever.

Selene grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him to his feet. The flames behind his glassy eyes flared, and his lips twisted hatefully.

The Hero of the Scything Squall whistled a sharp note, and Selene gasped as a hurricane hand slammed into her gut and lifted her clear off her feet. She hit the far side of the tomb, cracked the back of her head against its bricks, and tumbled bonelessly to the ground. Darkness crept in from every side of her vision, pulling her into bleak unconsciousness-

No.

Her heart flames roared, and Selene planted a hand beneath her. Forced herself to rise.

Scythas glared at her warily from across the tomb. There and somewhere else at the same time. Her gaze slid past him, to the gates behind. Her heart sank.

She could hardly see the ivory. The bees had covered every inch of it.

The sound of buzzing grew louder and louder as more of the insects flooded into the subterranean tomb, coating the walls thicker than any paint. The temperature rose along with the noise. The vibration of their buzzing wings shook the ground beneath her, displacing dust from the walls and making the vibrant ivy shroud rustle and sway over the coffin.

The coffin.

Selene forced herself to rise, even as the infernal buzzing and the rising heat made her vision blur at the edges. She buried her hands into the ivy and tore it away by the fistful, heedless of the burning rash that dug into her skin wherever the poison leaves brushed. The coffin underneath it was the grandest thing in the entire tomb, nearly as green as the ivy that had clung to it and studded with a hundred gem stones. Lapis Lacedaemonius.

Selene heaved the sacred coffin’s lid aside and dashed it against the ground, where it cracked and split apart with a thundering boom.

Scythas whistled another violent note when she approached him. This time, she was prepared for it. She braced her feet and narrowed her eyes against the wind, pushing through it one laborious step at a time and seizing the delirious Hero by his hair.

“Stop it! Stop! Don’t touch me!”

Selene reared back and slammed her forehead against his as hard as she could. Then she dragged his limp body by the hair across the tomb, back to the defiled coffin in its center. Yawning open, bereft of a corpse. Bereft of anything at all.

Looking down into what could only be described as a gaping abyss, a tunnel into the earth where there should have been a corpse, Selene felt a faint and reasonable unease. Unfortunately, the deafening buzz of thousands of bees and the heat of their vibrating bodies drowned out all rational alternatives from her mind.

Ah well.

“In you go,” she said, and tossed the Hero down into the abyss. He vanished from sight in an instant. She waited a breath, then two, then three. When she didn’t hear him hit the ground after ten breaths, she groaned softly. This would hurt.

Vaulting the lip of the coffin and hurtling down into the abyssal chasm within, Selene heard the sound of the bees shift and change its pitch. Rhythmic, and bright.

Like they were laughing.

1.92ish [Selene]

Selene

It was a pitiful truth that a person’s demons resided within as often as they did without.

Selene had learned this truth early on, internalized it within herself and built the monument of her soul around it. Humanity was its own worst enemy. From the grandest scale of war between nations of thousands and millions, all the way down to the tragic conflict of a single tortured soul. She was only sixteen years old, a blink of an eye by the standards of people like her father, but already she had seen sights that would make any man sick to his stomach. She had suffered tribulation and unending despair, black resentment that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up whenever she recalled its oily touch. Even if only by proxy, she had felt these feelings. She had seen for herself how ugly a human heart could be.

Burn down a man’s home, take from him his friends and family, steal away all that he’s ever loved. Do all of those things, do more, and it still wouldn’t be enough to make him hate you as viciously as Selene had seen cultivators hate themselves.

In her role as the Scarlet Oracle, she had offered counsel to Heroic cultivators that reviled themselves more than the Fates ever could. She had seen great men and women torn apart from the inside, ravaged from within as if they’d caged a feral animal in their chest rather than a beating heart. She’d seen Heroes that had stood on top of the world long before she was born scrape and grovel at her feet for some peace while blood poured out of their every orifice. She had cradled in her arms Heroines twice her size and many times stronger while they wept and choked on their own black bile.

Selene had done the best she could to ease their pain, but there was only so much an unanointed Oracle could do. She could take their troubles in and sleep on them, perhaps find an answer when the morning came, but by then it was often too late. By the time a troubled soul found its way to her, their pain was so dire that only an immediate solution could save them. Cultivators were stubborn in that way. They rarely sought salvation in another unless they were all but entirely submerged in the River Styx already.

Her father had done his best to comfort her, early on. He had promised her that whatever she could do for the people brought before her was more than enough - more than they deserved. He had rubbed soothing circles on her back and brushed the bitter tears from her eyes, and he had told her that some people were simply too far gone to save. No matter what you did, not even if you were perfect. Some people couldn’t be protected, even by a shield of peerless adamant.

Some people just wanted to die.

“It should be here,” the Hero of the Scything Squall muttered, voice muffled by his own hands. The breeze carried the words to her ear anyway. “It should be here, and it isn’t.”

“We don’t know that,” Selene disagreed, crawling on hands and knees to peer under the rows of benches that sat empty in the Orphic House. “Not yet. Not until we’ve scoured every corner. There could be a cup or a barrel tucked away in any of these shadows.”

Scythas dug his fingers into his scalp, hunching over further. His despair was palpable. At this point, he was hardly even trying to hide it. Since his confrontation with the Rosy Dawn’s scarlet son, his heart had withdrawn like a turtle into its shell. Hiding away, jealously guarding any signs of the effect that Griffon’s words had had on him. Now, those insecurities were bleeding out of the wounds he’d tried so hard to keep staunched. Even if Selene hadn’t been herself, she would have felt it in the air.

Nothing under the bench but cobwebs and wood rot. Her silks and stolen rags scraped and caught on the jagged seams of roughly joined planks. She was covered in dust and surrounded by the stale odor of abandoned architecture, but she refused to give in to her fellow Heroic cultivator’s despair. Not now. Not when there was finally hope - a light in the near distance. Within her reach at last.

If the circumstances weren’t what they were, she would have given Scythas’ grief the attention it deserved. Solus had done his best to pull the man back to his feet, but some wounds never healed unless they were directly treated. She could have tried. But that was a risk she couldn’t take now. She couldn’t afford to get lost in another cultivator’s heart anymore.

Not while her mother’s cure was on the line.

“I don’t understand it.” Scythas shook his head, his pneuma rising and fell tempestuously. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” she asked, dousing her annoyance.

There were words and symbols carved into the benches and walls, even the pillars that held up the weight of the odeon’s roof. None of them were relevant to their purpose here, though. Names, brief messages, insults and compliments and etched drawings of people and their horses and the places that they had been. Mementos, carved by Thracian hands into the wooden wagons that had carried the weight of their entire lives for generations before the Conqueror came and tore them apart for building materials.

“I spoke it in his voice. His voice, and none other. Bakkhos told me that his voice alone would be enough to secure me a drink if I was ever in Thracia,” and here the Hero’s voice changed. Shifting, to mimic the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult as it had before. “After all, it isn’t as if they can see who’s talking, eh?”

It was more than a mimicry, in truth. When Selene closed her eyes and listened to him speak in that voice, it wasn’t Scythas she saw in her mind’s eye. It was the kyrios, grand as he’d ever been, lounging with his cup in hand and that distant amusement in his eyes as he regarded her. When Scythas spoke with Bakkhos’ voice, it wasn’t his breath that formed the words. It was the breeze that did it. A perfect echo, carried by the wind at his request. It was an ability that Selene had never encountered before, one that had shocked her when he first revealed it their first night in Thracia, in that moonlit vineyard.

A unique excellence, as the scarlet son had put it.

“Did he specify what kind of drink you’d receive?” Selene asked him, running her hands along the bottom ridge of a wall-mounted viewing balconies before gripping it and pulling herself up to peer through its rails. Nothing but dust. Not even a scurrying insect. “Socrates sent us here for wine, but that isn’t necessarily what the kyrios meant, is it?”

And in the end, two of their party had been given drinks.

“No.”

“No to which question?”

“No to both. He didn’t specify, but he couldn’t have meant anything else. I refuse to believe it. He wouldn’t have sent me all this way just for milk and honey. He wasn’t that cruel.”

“Are you sure?” Selene asked him quietly. The Hero didn’t respond.

Finally, when she had looked under every bench and peered through every rail, climbed along the rafters and checked every corner of the odeon, Selene allowed herself to admit that there was nothing to be found. There was only one place she had yet to look, one place she had yet to look inside, and it was resting center stage. Sacrilege was an accursed act no matter which corpse was being defiled. To tear away the ivy and crack open the tomb where a Hero lay at rest… that was hubris, even by her standards.

She bit her lip. Still…

“Solus,” she called, looking back up the stands. “What should we-?”

Selene gasped. Scythas pulled his hands away from his face, eyes going wide.

They were gone.

“What?” Scythas breathed, rising to his feet. The hazel torch light of his eyes swept over the Orphic House, a breeze kicking up and throwing the dust coating every surface up into the air. Selene squinted through it, but still she couldn’t find them. “Where did they-?”

“I don’t know.” She rushed up the benched stands, two tiers at a time, and stood in the place that Solus had been standing. There was nothing. No trace of either of them. She turned back to Scythas, her heart beginning to hammer in her chest. He looked as stricken as she felt.

“You’re certain you didn’t see them go?” he pressed her.

“You didn’t hear them?” she asked him in return. He shook his head, eyes darting to every corner of the singing house.

“Solus?” he tried, and when no answer was forthcoming he grit his teeth and tried the other. “Griffon?”

Nothing.

They couldn’t have left the way they’d entered, not through that heavy gate of ivory. Scythas would have heard them. Anyone would have heard them. Yet there was no sign of them here. Where could they have gone? What could they have done?

Selene considered the shadows lurking on the edges of the light case by their hearts’ flames.

“Maybe-“

There came a sound from outside of the odeon, back the way they’d come. The dull sound of iron cutting through flesh, and the impact of something heavy hitting the snow that covered the earth. Two of the three horses they’d given as payment screamed, Griffon’s white mare in fear and Solus’ black charger in fury. She heard, distantly through the wooden slats, the sound of the Thracian man and woman grunting as the horses fought them.

The dull sound of iron biting into flesh rang out again.

Griffon cried out in agony.

Selene’s heart flew up into her throat and she lunged at the entrance. Scythas made it there before her, despite the fact that he’d been twice as far away a moment ago. He wrenched at the ivory gates, snarling in frustration when they refused to budge. Locked.

Through the scant barrier of the gate, she heard Solus shout a furious challenge. The sound of struggle and shattering wood followed.

“Solus!” Scythas yelled, panicked, and disdained the gates in favor of attacking the decrepit walls of wagon wood. Somehow, impossibly, those rotten planks rebuffed his fists and the shrieking gale winds he leveled against him both.

“Together!” Selene hissed, planting one foot against the wall beside the gates and pulling with all her might. Scythas mirrored her, veins bulging in his neck and the sinew of his arms as he heaved. She gave it everything she had, until hew vision blurred white and it felt like her arms would tear away. Scythas screamed in tortured effort.

The ivory gates cracked and groaned open. Scythas dove and Selene lunged underneath, both of them slipping through the gates as they immediately swung shut again. The sound of their closing was monstrous, like they weighed a thousand-thousand times more than they should have.

But when they landed, it wasn’t outside. It wasn’t anywhere at all.

Selene stared at sloping walls of shadowed brick, rising up all around her like the inside of a beehive.

“Where are we?” Scythas asked, crouching warily and casting around with every sense available to him. “Where are the others? The horses-?”

She realized what they had done.

In the center of the beehive tomb was another ivy-shrouded coffin. As the torch light of their hearts’ flames fell upon it, the vibrant green leaves rustled and swayed.

Behind them, the ivory gates loomed.

1.91(ish) [An Unkindness]

An Unkindness

“You don’t know,” the raven known as Solus said dully. He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Socrates, the Scholar himself, hadn’t had an immediate answer for him. Why should this faceless man? There were even odds that there was no man at all, just a figment of his deceptive imagination, but even if there was a man in the business of handing out golden cups of wine, who was to say he’d also be handing out the secrets to Greek cultivation?

The raven had used up all his good fortune early in life. From here on, it would be struggle. Going forward, he knew he couldn’t hope to be given what he desired - what he needed. He would have to take it.

“Are you a Greek at all?” he asked. The raven had assumed that whatever he encountered in this place would be cut from the same cloth as the cult whose rites sent him here, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Aristotle had warned him that true answers to ill-formed questions were at times more detrimental than lies. The Gadly had hammered into him the practice of asking until the proper question was found.

“I am a son of raging heaven.”

Thunder rumbled in the shadowed grove.

“How did you come to be the man you are today?”

Try, and try again. Until the proper question was found.

“I was born. I’ve lived. Soon enough, I’ll die.”

Another. Substance could be found even in the vagueries of Greek thinkers. As a young man, the raven had scoffed and turned his nose up at the barbarians accepted into his father’s legion when they had leveled that sentiment towards Rome. These days, he empathized with them just a bit. To a Gaul, a Roman’s diction might have seemed nearly as frivolous as a Greek’s was to a Roman. That did not mean they had nothing to say that was worth hearing, though.

“You inherited your strength?”

“What strength?” the man asked, amused. “What have I done that seems strong to you? Offered you a drink and called you greedy?”

The raven considered the words carefully before he spoke them. “The further a man advances, the more he becomes.”

“More of what?”

“Himself. Everything. He becomes greater and more terrible, in a way that can be felt by the world around him. By the Greek standard, a Civic cultivator could stand out in a crowd of a hundred crude souls. A Sophic cultivator could bend the minds of a hundred Citizens. A Heroic cultivator could blind a hundred Philosophers. And a Tyrant could take a hundred Heroes into their hand.”

“And? What comes next?” the man behind pressed him, expectant in the way a parent was expectant of their adolescent child. Amused, knowing they wouldn’t get a proper answer, but willing to be pleasantly surprised. “Who stands above a hundred Tyrants?”

“I don’t know,” the raven named Solus murmured. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

The man laughed delightedly. The heat on the raven’s back grew hotter.

“You’re making an outrageous assumption, greedy raven. Can you justify it?”

“To a Citizen, a Philosopher is a profound existence,” the raven explained himself, cognizant of the unspoken threat and the fact that his fellow scavenger still hadn’t moved or contributed a word to the conversation. “To a Philosopher, a Hero’s presence is an overwhelming glory. To a Hero, a Tyrant’s focus is an unspeakably heavy burden. The gap between a single realm is substantial enough. If the contrast is greater than that?”

The divide between an unrefined Greek and a newly ascended Philosopher was stark enough for a crude fisherman to offer the bounty of his full day’s work in exchange for a pithy word of advice from a Sophic cultivator. I had experienced for myself the overwhelming pressure of a Tyrant’s unrestrained focus when Damon Aetos had rendered judgment on me the day I arrived in his city. Even shackled and chained, deaf and blind to pneuma, I had felt that weight as a physical thing.

“I am a Philosopher of the first rank,” the raven continued. “I have weathered the ire of barbarian kings and cruel kyrioi, met their disdainful glares with my own and shrugged their notice off my shoulders. But I can’t bring myself to look back while you’re sitting there behind me. Being this close to you burns.”

Whatever it was that sat behind the raven from Rome, it wasn’t a Tyrant.

“True statements,” the man admitted, “But not one of them is proof. If you’re going to make that sort of assumption, you need to prove it. You still haven’t done it.”

He still wasn’t asking the right question.

The raven closed his eyes.

“What is the first virtue?”

The man hummed. In amusement, he answered.

“Fortitude.”

Searing light washed away the shadows of the forest grove, golden rays piercing through the raven’s veil like spearheads and prying into the seams of his eyelids. The raven’s midnight mantle went up in flames, the smell of his own burning hair filling his nostrils. He couldn’t breathe, so he held his breath and throttled the instinctive urge to choke and gag. The raven from Rome burned. He forced himself to bear it.

Forced himself to ask the proper question.

“And what,” he rasped, “is fortitude?”

“Courage, always. Courage then, courage now, and courage every day thereafter.” With every word, the heat burned more unbearably and the light grew ever brighter. The man didn’t raise his voice because he didn’t have to. Bearing the virtue of his soul was enough. Pulling back the veil was already more than the raven’s mortal frame could take. “When all the stars have fallen from the sky, when every father has been buried by their daughter and every son has returned to their mother, fortitude is the virtue of that which remains. Fortitude is that which endures, even when the world is bleak and cold.

“I am that which endures,” he clarified, and the raven hunched in on himself as the fire rose again. He wrapped his burning cloak around himself and tucked his face into his crossed arms. It wasn’t enough to escape the heat. “I am courage in the face of future tragedy. I am the timeless acknowledgement of life’s cruelty and the enjoyment of it in spite. I am fortitude. I am a promise.”

“A promise of what?” The raven couldn’t hear his own voice over the roaring of his own blood in his ears. Fortunately, the man behind him could.

“That no matter how many times I fall, I will rise again tomorrow.”

The sensation of flesh burning and blood boiling in its veins flickered and vanished like a snuffed candle. The raven tensed as the man behind laid a bracing hand on his back. Cool serenity flooded his body from that point of contact, scorched flesh and half-cooked organs mending themselves as quickly as they’d been harmed. The taste of burnt blood faded from his tongue. The stench of his own burning body cleared out of his nostrils. Even still, the raven did not relax until the hand withdrew.

“Some things can’t be inherited,” the man informed him, not unkindly. “Some things can only be taken.”

“How?” the raven asked, though he knew it was the wrong question. He shook his head, frustrated with himself more than any Greek. Beside him, the raven known as Griffon continued to stare sightlessly ahead. His lips were moving, murmuring in a low voice, but the raven couldn’t hear the words. He was uninjured and unphased.

Was it proof that the raven from Rome was the one that had received the ivory cup of lies? Maybe. Was it a quirk of nature, a scarlet son’s immunity to grasping hands of flame? How was he to tell? He had no idea. He had nothing at all. Only his intuition, and a lyre made of ivory lies.

The raven set his golden cup of wine and his cup of ivory or horn on the ground and pulled the instrument from his shadow. He strummed its strings in search of the proper question. The man behind him listened patiently, occasionally humming along as he played. Only when the last chord had been plucked and the music had faded from the grove did he speak.

“You think too much.”

The raven blinked. Of all the reproaches he had come to expect from the sons and daughters of Greece, that one was unique among them.

“I… do?”

“Every age that passes, man understands a bit more of the world, and shackles himself a bit tighter to that understanding. In my time, what you call cultivation, or refinement of the soul, we called living. You’ve tied yourself into a knot, worrying about citizens and philosophers, heroes and tyrants. You are a man before you are any of those things. Live your life, brother. That’s all any of us have to do.”

“It isn’t enough” the raven from Rome immediately denied. “I have to advance. I need to ascend. The world isn’t what it was in your time - what you have, I could never achieve simply by surviving.”

“I didn’t tell you to survive. I told you to live.”

The raven grit his teeth and clenched his ivory lyre so tightly that it began to crack.

“What is the difference?”

“The journey.”

The man behind withdrew for a brief moment, the sound of rummaging cloth and the sensation of receding heat the only signs that the raven could bring himself to perceive. When he spoke again, it was with the Gadfly’s exasperated patience. Aristotle’s merciless honesty. Gaius’ grave expectation.

His father’s concern.

“Seek fulfillment in all things, and you’ll never have to worry whether your cup was carved from ivory or from horn. Decide what it is that defines you, and master them - refine them, and in so doing you will refine yourself. Climb this divine ladder that your ancestors built if you feel you must, but know that it is not necessary to achieve what you desire. A man doesn’t need to be strong to live well.”

“Carthage must be destroyed,” the raven from Rome asserted with his soul, with weight behind every word. “Until I’ve done unto them what they did unto me, I won’t be able to live. Not until I’ve burnt their legions to ash and salted what remains.”

The man behind him sighed.

“Do you know why it is that we call a gathering of ravens an unkindness?”

“No.”

“Because each of you is a grim messenger. You bring about grief and misfortune, always. Whether it’s news of infidelity, the death of family or the loss of a friend, a raven carries only sorrow in its cruel talons.”

“The truth is often cruel.”

“It is,” the faceless man agreed. “And cruelty can be necessary. But in its proper place, and at its proper time. One tragedy is enough to last a man months, years, even a lifetime. A raven on the roof is a reality that no man can avoid forever. We all suffer our own sorrows.

“However.”

For the first time in their brief conversation, the man behind the raven spoke in wrath.

“Anything more beyond that is senseless inhumanity. Carthage wronged you, so you’ll burn them to the ground. Fine. That’s a tragedy, but perhaps a necessary one in the end. But that isn’t where you’ll stop. That isn’t all you’ll do, is it?”

The raven from Rome lifted his chin. He lifted his lip and bared his teeth behind his burnt and twice-blackened veil, though he knew the man behind him couldn’t see it.

“It isn’t. I’ll salt the city that begot them, too, just as they salted mine. I’ll wipe them from this earth and all of its histories.”

“Why?” the man asked, though he already knew.

“So nothing can ever grow there again.”

The same tanned arm as before reached out, into his peripheral vision, and placed a second golden cup of wine next to the first.

“An eye for an eye.” He sounded disappointed.

“No.”

Tragedy for tragedy wasn’t enough. An eye for an eye was too little. Vengeance for himself was only a fraction of what was owed. The raven’s name was Solus.

He was all that remained.

“I am Roman, and I am Greek,” he said, the realization stirring his soul. His pneuma rose. “My story is not mine alone. I am a man, and I am three thousand men as well. I am one, and I am legion.”

Alone, a grim messenger. But together?

“I am a raven. And I am an unkindness.”

Driven by the weight of an ideal, a principle discovered and internalized, the raven advanced.

The raven known to some as Lio Aetos and to others as Griffon blinked and abruptly turned away from the delusions of his dream as his brother’s pneuma surged. Doubling and redoubling again. Advancing from the first stage of the Sophic Realm to the second, to join him on the twelfth step.

His heart lightened. Joy banished the false Heroes from the corners of his eyes. He turned to regard his brother.

“Worthless Roman, it took you long enough-”

His breath caught in his throat.

1.90(ish) [An Unkindness]

An Unkindness

Through horn, truth. By ivory, lies.

The motif was a quirk of the Aeolic Greek dialect and nothing more. That was what the raven from Rome had been taught. Aristotle, his mentor and the Father of Rhetoric, had explained it in this way: The Greek word for ‘horn’ struck the ear nearly the same as the Greek verb ‘to fulfill’, while the Greek word for ‘ivory’ sounded almost identical to the Greek verb ‘to deceive’. The fact that these two materials were visually all but indistinguishable was a miraculous linguistic coincidence, one that the great poet Homer had made full use of in his epics and tragedies.

Aristotle had stressed, however, that a coincidence was likely all that it was. There was no observable property in either horn or ivory that could be meaningfully associated with prophecy or delirium. Horns could be hollowed out and used as drinking cups or brass instruments, and ivory was a precious material coveted for art of all kinds. None of those properties lent themselves to religious euphoria.

Compelling men tell compelling stories. But you have to understand, boy, whether it’s Homer or the Muses themselves whispering in your ear, you’ll never truly know a thing until you’ve seen it for yourself. The Odyssey was a story worth telling, that much is true. But a clever turn of phrase does not necessarily a natural phenomena make.

The wizened philosopher had couched his skepticism in terms of “likely” and “not necessarily” only because, in his own words, Heroic cultivators were a ridiculous existence that only occasionally followed natural convention. It was unfortunately possible, then, for a story from their Heroic Golden Age to be just as absurd in its events while also being true. Either way, his experiments and his observations had not informed him enough to say for certain. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say the dichotomy was a false one.

A man had to see the way of things for himself.

The raven known as Solus accepted a golden cup of wine from an outstretched hand, cradling it in one hand while the other held his horn cup of milk and honey. The golden cup was uncomfortably warm, hot enough to scald a lesser cultivator. The wine simmered and bubbled, just short of boiling.

“Go on,” the voice behind him urged. “There’s no need to hold back on my account.”

“Who are you?” the raven asked. He did not look back.

His back burned. The sensation was just short of unbearable, like sitting at the edge of a bonfire and waiting to catch flame.

“‘Who am I’, he says,” the man behind him chuckled, and that tanned hand clapped the raven on his shoulder once and then twice for good measure. He felt the immediate burn it left on his skin. “I suppose it hardly matters now. I’m the man that’s offering to quench your thirst. How’s that?”

“… My thirst isn’t for wine.”

“No. It never was. But in a bind, the next best thing will do, won’t it?”

The raven sneered behind his midnight veil at the stench of sea salt and cloying ash. He had seen for himself what the next best thing was worth. He had been reminded of that reality every day after his father passed. The Fifth Legion, his father’s legion, had suffered the consequences of that next best thing.

“It won’t.”

Not now. Not then. Not ever again.

“No? It always did before.” After a thoughtful pause that the raven from Rome didn’t bother to interrupt, the man behind him continued. “I see it now. You’ve come here for a different sort of satiation. So be it - give me back my cup of wine and we’ll talk.”

“No.”

“Ho?”

The raven’s shoulders tensed. If the man behind him took offense to his hubris, truly took offense, he would die. It was something he understood instinctively. An animal’s primal intuition.

The man chuckled.

“You’ve come to be greedy. You are a raven, aren’t you?”

“I am many things, and few of them are good.”

“Isn’t that the truth? Well enough - keep the sour wine. And tell me, brother, what is it that ails you?”

The raven known as Solus glanced sidelong at his bare-chested brother. The raven known as Griffon stared sightlessly ahead at the shadowed grove of trees they had both ended up in. If their roles had been reversed, the silence might have been overlooked. But he had known his companion too well for too long. Something wasn’t right.

His brother wasn’t engaging with the conversation, a choice entirely unlike him. If nothing else, he should have had a pithy comment or a biting remark of some kind to interject with at the most inappropriate moment of discourse. That he hadn’t reacted at all meant he had to still be under the sway of the milk and honey’s delirium. Seeing and hearing less than what the raven from Rome could.

Or perhaps more.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“A question with more than one answer, I’m sure.”

He amended his question. “Why hasn’t he come back to his senses yet?”

“Who’s to say he hasn’t? What makes you so sure that you’re the sane one, here? You’re the raven cawing at itself.”

“I’m talking to you,” the raven said, irritated.

“You are?”

“I am.”

“Then look at me.”

The raven grit his teeth.

“I’ll die.”

“Perhaps.”

The raven turned his head-

And his shadow rose up from its place on the forest floor and covered his eyes with its hands.

Not yet, it whispered in his ear. Not until the battle’s won.

“Why would one of us return before the other?” the raven asked instead, gripping his cup of hollowed out horn tightly. “Neither one of us took the drinks we were offered in the Orphic House. We should both have been lucid, or equally delirious. Truth in horn or ivory delusion, the sources of our cups were the same.”

“Were they?”

The raven's eyes widened behind his shadow’s protective palms.

One raven speaks only the truth. The other raven lies.

It fell seamlessly into place within him. One of the Thracian gatekeepers had given them a cup of ivory. The other had given them horn. A man and a woman in nearly identical cult attire. Which was which? It was too late to tell.

“… It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t? How so?”

“Whether you’re a delusion of my mind or a mystery annoyance, it doesn’t matter to me. If you can give me the clarity that I seek, then you’re real enough.”

The man behind snorted. “Pragmatic, I suppose. Go on, then. Ask the question you truly want to ask.”

The raven from Rome exhaled slowly, and let fly the question that had been burning in his mind ever since he pulled the Scarlet City’s shackles off his wrists.

“How do I refine myself?”

The man behind did not hesitate to answer.

“I don’t know.”

Worthless, vacuous Greeks.

1.89 [An Unkindness]

An Unkindness

Horn is fulfilled. Ivory deceives.

Two ravens and two Heroic souls had entered the Orphic house through gates of ivory - or perhaps it was horn. In the empty stands and shadowed rafters, the ravens had heard the echo of a lyre where the Hero of the Scything Squall had heard nothing at all. And thus they had ventured into the true singing house, immersing themselves in chthonic shadow that a crow could only briefly traverse.

Prior to that, two initiates of the Thracian Orphic mystery had seen the stirring of once awoken shadows. and so they had offered each raven a drink that they would need to make it through their second anointment. A gift from Senior to Junior, each of them a cup of hollowed out horn - or perhaps it was ivory.

Their drinks were simple milk and honey, same as every intoxicated soul in the singing house. It wasn’t the alcohol that intoxicated a man of Orphic faith, after all. It was enthusiasm. The inspiration of divine essence.

To be anointed once, a man had to be made aware of the truth that lurked beneath the shadowed earth. From horn, the truth. From ivory, only lies. To be anointed twice, and stand proud as a full initiate of chthonic mystery faith, a man had to see that truth for himself. To experience it, as the first and most reviled son of scarlet sin had, and thus be reborn.

If their cups were of horn and the rest of the spectators cups of ivory, then that would mean these rites were true. If the opposite, then everything the ravens had seen would have to be lies.

The raven who was Lio “Griffon” Aetos knew his cup was made of horn. He knew it.

But he was beginning to doubt.

“I didn’t know it was possible for you to look this pitiful,” Lydia Aetos spoke, seated beside the raven in the shadowed forest grove. “To think I’d live to see you make such a face. The world must be ending after all.”

The raven did not respond to the playful jab. Neither did he turn his head. But he couldn’t stop himself from looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

Lydia Aetos regarded him fondly, her features lit by a warm fire light that was entirely out of place in the otherwise shadowed grove. She sat on the ground -  sprawled, really - with one leg folder over the other in leisure and one elbow to prop her up. She was dressed not in her usual cult silks, but in midnight cloth and leather dyed white. Where the black cloth shifted on her shoulders and parted, It revealed the bronze breastplate she wore like a second skin. Her actual skin was still marble smooth and just as pale, but marred now by the faint silver of lasting scars

She was taller than she had been in his last memory of her. The lines of muscle in her legs and arms were more pronounced than before, and if the breastplate was as skintight as it looked then the muscles of her core had been further refined as well. She was further refined. A woman now, more than a girl. A warrior.

And a Heroine. Her eyes burned with the light of her heart’s flame as she regarded him.

She wasn’t real. Every word she spoke only made him more certain of it. Every moment he suffered her delusion, he grew less sure that the cup he had drank from was horn and not ivory.

“What’s wrong, Lio?” Myron Aetos asked him, seated at his other side. Lit by the same nebulous fire light, his appearance was an even more startling contrast than the Young Miss’. “You haven’t spoken a word since you got here. This isn’t like you.”

The boy, now nearly a man, sat with his legs crossed and an elbow resting on each knee. Many people, most people in fact, were unsightly until they refined themselves. Myron though, had been born cherubic. An adorable infant, later a precocious young boy with the promise of a handsome man in the shape of his jaw and the noble bridge of his nose. The young man the raven now spied from the corner of his eye was that promise delivered.

The delusion of Myron Aetos frowned, his brow furrowing. a familiar expression now entirely changed. He had retained the fairest of his features and grown into the ones that always gave his youth away when he tried emulating his elders as a boy. His unconscious, concerned scowl was no longer amusing and cute. His narrow eyes were fierce, now.

Made all the more so by the vibrant blue flames burning behind them. The little kyrios was older but not yet grown, not like the delusion of Lydia, but he was a Hero nonetheless. An unprecedented standing for a cultivator that was still as close to boyhood as he was the prime of his maturation. He wore a breastplate and greaves, with a helmet topped by scarlet feathers resting on the ground by his hip. He wore leather boots. In place of Lydia’s scars, he had a scarf wrapped around his neck that was soaked through with blood.

He wasn’t real either. The raven ignored him just the same, though it made him doubt a little more.

“What am I meant to do with you if you won’t even look my way?” Castor Aetos murmured up above.

Perched languidly in the overhanging branch of a tree, illuminated by fire’s light, the foot that he let dangle flexed rhythmically while his head bobbed. He had a sword laying across his lap and a whetstone in his hand. Each swipe of the stone across his blade’s edge was a punctuation of a beat only he could hear.

His features were as fair as the raven remembered, his long dirty blonde hair braided and bound by rings of gold in a ponytail that dangled nearly as far down as his foot. His face was cleanly shaven, and in place of armor he wore only unadorned white cloth riddled with tears and cuts. He was larger, as well. Larger than the raven, even.

His eyes could not be seen behind the strip of linen he tied over them, but the light of his Heroic soul could be seen bleeding through the fabric.

He wasn’t real. But even so.

“You can talk to me, you know,” Rena Aetos assured the raven. Above and to the right, she hung upside down from a different tree branch, her arms dangling freely along with her hair while her legs kept her steady. She smiled and winked at the raven, knowing he could see her at the edge of his vision. “Just this once, I don’t mind being the one that listens.”

Her arms swayed, and the iron manacles afixed to each of them clanked and rattled audibly against one another as they did. Four of them on each arm, severed chains dangled from each one. The same was true of her legs - four bands of iron for each calf, stacked one atop the other in a line. She wore them like bangles and bracelets.

She even had a collar of cruel iron sealed around her throat. Yet it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. In fact, she had inscribed it. A serpent had been carved into the surface of the slave’s choker, the head meeting the tail at the center of her throat and devouring it. Somehow, she didn’t mind.

Somehow, despite the fact that she was bonded in iron nearly twenty times over, the flames of her Heroic spirit still burned warmly behind her eyes.

She wasn’t real. He doubted.

“You’ll break this silence,” Nikolas Aetos said with unshaken conviction. “It’s what you do.”

Of the raven’s myriad delusions, this one alone was nearly unchanged from his most recent memory of the cultivator in question. Nicolas was larger than he had been before, nearly as large as the chthonic Hero Orpheus, but Heroes grew fast and the young prodigy of the Rosy Dawn grew faster still. His skin was still ruggedly tanned, his eyes the same burning blue, black hair cropped nearly as short as Sol’s, and he still wore the same armor and sailing leathers.

Aside from his increased stature, there were only two real differences. His wedding ring was gone, and the hilt of the sword sheath at his side was changed.

He was by far the closest to reality, but he was the fakest of them all. The raven knew it, because he knew that hilt. It was attached to the blade that the raven carried at his side, in that very moment.

The raven knew without question his cousins were not there in that shadowed grove with him, like he knew there was no fire to illuminate them and no way for Nikolas’ blade to have a hilt that he was himself carrying.

But he had also known that his cup was horn and not ivory. Just as he had known that the world outside of the scarlet city, beyond the reach of Damon Aetos, was a vast and vibrant thing filled with people worth telling stories off. The raven known as Griffon had known many things.

He had thought that, anyway.

“After all this time, I finally get to see you somber,” the delusion that could not be Castor mused, the rag that covered his eyes glowing faintly. “I thought it would be peaceful. Now I realize it just makes me feel uneasy.” The light did not shift, not even once. His eyes weren’t moving - but his dangling foot still tapped away at the beat of an unsung song.

“Something happened,” the delusion that could not be Myron Aetos guessed. The young man massaged his temples, burning blue eyes flickering fitfully as he thought hard. “Something’s wrong, I can tell. Hold on, just let me think-“ in the sourceless fire light, the drops of blood that fell from his soaked scarf glimmered nearly gold.

“You’ll feel better if you speak it, no matter how bad it may be. That’s what you’ve always told me, isn’t it?” Hanging upside down from her tree, the delusion that could not be Rena reached precariously for the raven. the tips of her fingers were adorned with wicked golden claws. The severed chains of her myriad shackles rattled and glinted in the light. “Manifest it, Lio. Speak the words so I can help.”

The delusion that could not be Nikolas waited patiently. Content to let the raven have the next word, however long it took. He stroked the hilt of his sword with an idle thumb as he basked in the fire’s warmth.

“Son of sullen silence,” the delusion that could not possibly be Lydia murmured, tilting her head while she regarded the raven. “What could possibly be terrible enough to seal your lips?” She looked at him like she was seeing a mirage, or a half-forgotten dream. Something nearly there, but not quite.

Ivory deceives. Horn is thus fulfilled.

The most potent deception was the one that convinced. Convincing a skeptical man of a lie was nearly impossible, if he knew enough to look for it. Such a man would have to convince himself. But what could possibly motivate a skeptical man to turn away from truth in order to embrace a lie?

He had to want it to be true.

In the end, the difference between ivory and horn was nearly impossible to tell from the outside looking in. You had to crack them open. You had to see what was inside. If you found marrow, it was horn. Otherwise, a lie.

The raven known as Griffon remembered the Orphic house they had entered. Traversing shadows to converse with echoes of what had once been great souls. Imbibing milk and honey and falling under its psychedelic sway. This forest was a continuation of that intoxication. These facsimiles of his cousins were not real.

But he wanted them to be.

“The Fates are truly cruel,” the raven finally spoke. Each of his ivory cousins - or were they horn? - perked up at the sound of his voice, focusing intently on him. The raven lamented. “As if it wasn’t enough already. My own elder cousin, whom I have long admired, gone away to find what could not be found at home. As if it wasn’t enough. The older generation, bound by brotherhood and greater than their greatest children.”

As if it wasn’t enough that the raven had fled the nest in search of glory, and found the world nothing but grim.

“Treacherous heart.” The raven gripped his chest. His nails carved bloody furrows in his flesh. A delusion or a real and present injury? He wouldn’t know until he woke up. “Unsightly hunger. What use is spirit if the only flame that burns is hateful? What use is desire if the only thing I want is the one thing I’ll never, ever have?”

“You’re not making any sense, Lio,” the false Hero Myron Aetos said, concerned. The young man that should have been a boy leaned further towards the raven, illuminating further the design threaded through his blood-soaked scarf - an elephant run through by a spear head.

“Nothing makes sense. The world is not what it should be.”

“Then we’ll change it,” the false Heroine Rena insisted, twisting at the waist and lifting her chin so she could look at him properly rather than upside down as she hung. “That’s what a Hero does, isn’t it? When something is wrong, they make it right. That’s what you do.” In the sourceless illumination, the self-consuming serpent engraved in her slave collar shimmered and seemed to writhe.

“‘When something is wrong, a Hero makes it right’. I thought that’s what a Hero was. That’s what a Hero should be. But these days, a Hero can be anything at all - so long as they burn.”

“Can be. Should be. What does any of that matter?” the false Hero Castor asked the raven impatiently, dashing his whetstone against the earth below and pulling the linen bindfold down from his eyes. The hollow sockets settled unerringly on the raven, the flames within crackling. “The world is. We are. Since when has the Young Aristocrat cared enough about reality to lament its cruelty?”

“I’ve always cared. About all of it. Everything. That’s why this world infuriates me.”

“Because it’s less than what you thought it would be,” the false Hero Nikolas said knowingly. He caressed the Talon’s hilt, the relic of his late father, with a hand unadorned by any ring. A hilt that in truth hung at the raven’s hip. A hilt he could have had if he had stayed in the Scarlet City, if he had broken free alongside his cousins and taken what should have been his to inherit. “Because you want it to be more.”

“Because I know that it was more. Because I’ve seen the world in every shade, because I know it could be golden bright, but the life I was given is iron. No more kings and queens of glory. No everlasting providence. Only Tyrants, and the faceless corpses the pantheon left behind in its passing.”

What was the point of scaling the mountain when the view from the top was so grim? What pleasure was there in triumph when all of your opponents were weaker than they should have been? Weaker than their ancestors that came before them?

“When I won the Daylight Games, it stung worse than if I’d lost. I thought that bitterness would remain behind when I left the Scarlet City, but it followed me instead. Everywhere I go. No matter what I do. The best of what I find is what’s already dead and gone. The dregs are all that remain. That hollow victory is all that remains.”

Surrounded by beautiful delusions, the raven despaired. The Hero Nikolas had shown him that there were still things worth experiencing in this life, when he returned home for his marriage burning brighter than he ever had before. The brothers Aetos had proven to him that family could reach for the heights together, side by side as equals. Now here, in the shadowed grove of the Orphic mystery, the Fates had chosen to taunt him with what he might have had.

His cousins sat at the edges of his vision as they could have been, if they had been born earlier or he had been born later. If they had been courageous instead of cowardly. If they had been tempered rather than pretentious. Wise, and not foolish. Righteous, instead of petty.

They each bore scars of lasting tragedies, but the marks had not made them less like they had Scythas and the rest of Olympia’s Heroic cultivators. They had only refined them. They had only made them more.

The raven known as Griffon refused to look at any one of the false Heroes that could have been his cousins, because he knew that if he did he’d never look away.

“I could have had this. I could have had you. Instead, I burn alone.”

The chthonic Hero Orpheus had sung his song through Griffon’s heart, placed the words on his tongue with a form of communication unique to him - but in so doing, he had opened the raven’s senses to something only a Hero was meant to perceive.

The delusions that wore his cousins’ faces were fake, everything about them. That included the words they spoke with their hearts.

Every day since Nikolas had left, the raven had wondered why he hadn’t taken him along too. Every day that followed, he had wondered why his younger cousins weren’t as vibrant as the elder prodigy. After experiencing Chilon’s story, he had wondered why his father had enjoyed the company of brothers that hungered like he hungered, while his cousins had contented themselves with the petty business of cult politics and the aristois. What had Damon done to deserve his companions? What had Griffon not?

His answer came from all sides, spoken from the hearts of the cousins that he had always wanted but never had. From the Heroic souls that the raven had always known he belonged amongst.

His equals.

The false Heroine Lydia Aetos looked upon him sadly.

“You are a shadow, aren’t you?”

Was the cup ivory, or was it horn?

Either way, the pain was real.

1.88 [???]

???

You are born.

Your infant cries herald the end of endless spring and the first dawn of the summer sun. The sun beats warmly down. Your mother seeks shelter for you in the shade, while the first seeds are planted and the seasons begin the first of their tireless revolutions.

The wheel begins to turn. The world is silver-bright.

You are betrayed.

[Bring that golden lyre, yes, bring it.]

A Titan is to an Olympian what an Olympian is to a Man.

The oldest generation takes the youngest generation in their hands. You are torn apart, limb by limb, before you speak your first word. You scream in a voice so loud that their ears bleed and the heavens shake in their frame, but it is not enough to rouse your murdered mother. It is not enough to stir The Mother’s wrathful heart.

The Titans consume you one limb at a time. They bite into your organs and split them like overripe fruit. They crack your bones open and suck out the marrow therein. They crush to pulp the lungs in your chest to silence your wailing.

It’s almost a mercy when they finally deprive you of your senses. They take your ears, and you no longer have to hear the sound of their chewing. They take your nose, and you no longer have to smell their fetid breath and the stench of your own exposed innards. They take your tongue, and you no longer have to taste your own blood. Of course, even in their unavoidable kindness they are cruel.

They take your eyes last of all, so that you have to watch until the very end the feast they’ve made of you. The Titans devour you in the Fall, and your father who is The Father doesn’t notice until they’ve eaten everything but your heart.

Heaven rages. Lightning scours the earth and turns every Titan to ash. You alone remain, a senseless beating heart. Salt water falls from the clouds above. The Father mourns you as the world grows cold and the first winter digs its frigid fingers through the earth.

You die.

The wheel turns.

[But leave that string of blood out.]

You are born. Again.

The world is less than it was before, but still silver-bright. You grow to speak your first word. For a hundred years you grow alongside the other children. When you are finally a man, you venture into teeming fields and cultivate your first vine. The first grape you pick is sweet and ripe. It pops between your teeth, and you taste in it the labors of every man to come before you.

The Mother sees you one day as you tend your fields. She finds you as unsightly now as she did before. She curses the men and the women you shared a childhood with. In their madness, they tear you apart limb-by-limb and consume you. You beg them to stop until you can no longer form the words. You beg them with your eyes until those too are taken.

When nothing remains but your senseless beating heart, lightning scours the fields and salt water falls upon the ash that’s left behind.

You die. Again.

The wheel turns.

[Bring a cup of versing rules.]

You are born. Again. Your friends are long dead.

The world has lost yet more of its silver luster. Holy women take you into their arms and hide you away in mountain caves. They feed you milk and honey until you are grown. They feed you milk and honey to make you strong. In time, they teach you the nature of the world and reveal to you its mysteries. They tell you stories of the golden souls that came before you.

They warn you of your fellow men.

You venture out from your mountain cave and discover for yourself how a foreigner is treated in a dim, irreverent world.

The Mother hardly has to lift a finger to see you to your end this time. The King of Earliest Dawn is mad enough already. By the time you realize he’s tainted the food and drink offered under guest right with ivy poison, you’ve already ingested far too much of it. In your delirium and your sickness, you hardly feel it at all when the mad king’s dogs tear you limb from limb.

Senseless heart. Raging heaven’s wrath. A kingdom reduced to ash, and a deluge of saltwater grief to wash it all away. Your father, The Father, floods the world and starts anew.

You die. Again.

The wheel turns.

[Oh, and mix some metres in it.]

You are born. Again.

It was your father’s sin, not yours, but The Mother doesn’t care.

The world is cruel and growing crueler. No longer bright, no longer silver at all, but now a burnished bronze. Its men are merciless and strong, carved from ash trees and well-suited to war.

There are more mad kings than sane, now. The king that rules over the land of your birth is no different. The Mother whispers the truth of your origins into his ear, and he locks both you and your mother into a trunk and consigns it to the sea. No matter how loudly you wail, there is no one on the open waters to hear you but your mother. When she dies, there is no one to hear you at all.

When your trunk finally washes up on shore and you are found in the embrace of your mother’s bloated corpse, you’ve become a bit mad yourself. The woman to find you is no holy spirit, no priestess of your father, but she is kinder than most. She raises you in a field, and reminds you of the man you used to be one day at a time. You cultivate another field of vines, and though their grapes don’t taste as sweet as they did before, the memory is fond enough.

War finds your humble farm before The Mother does. The woman that raised you is violated and murdered. The men responsible disdain your howling rage and lash your limbs each to a different one of their horses. They pull you apart. They burn your vines and salt the earth.

You die. Again.

The wheel has ten spokes.

[I will sing, then I’ll be dancing.]

You are born. Again. You die. Again.

It goes.

The world is burnished bronze, and so you make war. You are a stranger in every land, a foreigner no matter where you go. You do not belong and The Mother makes certain you are never wanted. So you force yourself upon the world. You live in it regardless. Out of spite.

Defiant.

You march, and you fight. You gather men of similar minds to you, and you make that war together. As far as the Indus River, where The Mother takes on a native woman’s form and urges them to repel you. You fight, and you conquer, and you thirst. Every vine in every land bears less tantalizing fruit than the last.

Your father looks upon your works and despairs at the man you’ve become. He scours the world away in saltwater floods. Another deluge. Another death.

Turn.

[Not a drop of sense left in me.]

You are born again.

The world is… better.

No longer dimly lit by cruelly burnished bronze, it’s lit by defiance of noble souls. The lands are defined by great men and great women, cultivated as you cultivate your vines. Among them you find friends. Among them you find brothers.

One among them is your favorite.

The Mother hates him nearly as much as she hates you. She curses him with madness, as she cursed you, and breaks his back with labors. He suffers these tribulations with greater poise and grace than you ever did. He stands tall. He struggles on behalf of those that suffered before him, and those that will suffer after. He is a Champion.

You have nothing you can give him in support but your own senselessly beating heart, and so you do. He takes even that, and improves it. While it beats in his chest, it burns. It takes on his shade. It becomes something glorious. It becomes something triumphant.

For the first time, you feel something in the senseless beating of your heart. You experience passion.

And then your little brother is cut down.

You feel it in your heart now. The pain is worse because of it.

The wheel groans.

[I will dance to horn and zither.]

You exist.

The world is iron now.

Every vine you cultivate bears tainted fruit. The grapes festers and grow bitter, and when you bite into them you understand what the Titans must have felt when they devoured you. The juice drives you mad if not first diluted. You treat it with spices and herbs, with milk and honey, but it’s never quite the same as it was before. Even the memory is bittersweet.

These days, every king is a tyrant. You are no exception.

When The Mother finally dies, all that you feel is a dim satisfaction. You gather your followers and your slaves in the fist that isn’t busy holding your cup, and you go to her grave and revel over her corpse.

You drink until it finally kills you.

The wheel-

[Crying out the cries that wine makes.]

You are born.

The world is… golden-bright?

[Bring that golden lyre, yes, bring it.]

Yes.

The world is gold.

[Oh, but leave that string of blood out.]

Twin ravens, twice-anointed in twice-born faith, sit together in a shadowed grove of sweet delusion. Eventually, they come to their senses. Eventually, they realize they are not alone.

“You look parched, brother. Here. Have yourself a drink.”

From behind the hungry ravens, from a direction neither can turn their head to look, a voice sounds and a hand reaches out. Offering a drink to quench their senseless thirst.

A golden cup of wine.

1.87

The Young Griffon

We descended the last few tiers of benches, brushing past the aghast souls of long dead Orphic initiates.

Orpheus sat on his own ivy covered tomb. There was room on either side of him, but Sol disdained the implicit offer to sit side-by-side. Instead, he pulled an ivory stool from the same place he had pulled his lyre, which was to say nowhere, and sat directly across from the Augur with his back to the stands.

Not to be outdone, I manifested every hand of my violent intent and built myself a shadowed throne of thirty open palms. I crossed my legs and propped my chin up in a hand of flesh and blood while Sol adjusted the strings of his lyre as if they weren’t made of shadow and illusion.

The Augur’s smile deepened a shade at our unspoken refusal.

“Welcome to my home. My name is Orpheus, keeper of the strings. What are yours, friends?”

“Griffon,” I answered.

“Sol,” the Roman replied.

“Ah, I see. We make quite a set, don’t we?” The late Hero leaned back, one arm bracing him while the other idly tapped the golden neck of his instrument. “Three men named, and three names discarded.”

Sol’s fingers went still over his shadow strings.

“Orpheus isn’t your real name?” I asked curiously.

“It’s as real as yours,” the Hero replied. I inclined my head, conceding the point.

“Why Orpheus?”

“I was the product of an unfaithful union,” he explained. “When my father discovered the truth of things he cast me out. The name Orpheus denotes an orphan. Though I had been raised with a man I called my father, and though in time I came to know the ones responsible for my birth, I knew from that moment of exile that I was and would always be a child without his parents.”

He spoke with the ease of a man who had long since moved past his hardships. I suppose that was fitting. The concerns of the living hardly mean much to the dead.

“I was raised Lio Aetos,” I said, returning truth for truth. The keeper of strings chuckled.

“I suppose the name speaks for itself. Tell me, then: Sol has made his questions known. What brings you to my humble home?”

“We’re here for a good cup of wine.” It was the proper answer. The reason we were here, after all, was to find a golden cup of spirit wine for the Scholar. We had sailed the full length of the Aegean Sea and traversed the frozen lands of Thracia for this purpose alone.

One week had passed since we set sail from Olympia, one of only twelve. If we found our divine reagent here now and returned to the Eos with all possible haste, we might be done with the first of the Gadfly’s errands after a week and a half. It was a slower pace than what I desired. If we were to traverse these ten destinations and find every infernal component of the late kyrios’ nectar before the competitors were required to show for the Olympic Games, we would have to be faster. Even now, every moment that passed was one that I could not afford to spend.

But even so. Despite the fact that Kronos was against us, I couldn’t stop myself from uttering the words that came next. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering.

“What did you mean a moment ago? How has my brother made his questions known?”

That faint smile deepened again.

“The two of you are young.” It wasn’t a question. Sol nodded shallowly, confirming it anyway. “There are a multitude of discoveries that lie ahead of you. A thousand revelations that have yet to shake your hearts - experiences that can only move a man once. It’s enough to make me jealous.”

My eyes rolled behind my veil. “A meaningless response.”

The chthonic Hero stood.

It was a truth universally known that the line between mortality and divinity was drawn at the precipice of the Heroic Realm. Before that, every man and woman was equally frail in all the ways that truly mattered. When a man was born the Fates waved his destiny and swaddled him in it - the progression of his soul, the events that would define him, the pinnacle of his growth and the degradation of his health. Everything. All of it. Height, beauty, temperament and disposition.

Whether you were the lowest of the low Citizenry, or a captain of the Sophic realm, the ceiling was the same. Your reality was fixed. Predetermined. It wasn’t until - unless - a cultivator reached beyond their mortal standing and grasped the first handhold of their brazen epic that the constraints of fated humanity could be defied.

Beloved by the Muses. Reviled by the Fates. A Hero was an existence that was larger than life. Every deed done and every rank advanced only emphasized that fact. My father and my uncles stood taller than any mortal man could hope to grow. The disgraced kyrios of the Burning Dusk was much the same.

When Sol and I were standing, we saw eye to eye with one another. We were both nearly twenty hands tall, a height that put us noticeably above most mortal men. When Orpheus stood, he towered over us. Even if Sol had stood from his ivory stool and I had risen from my throne of shadowed palms, the Hero still would have dwarfed us. Twenty-five hands tall at least. Perhaps more.

This was a Hero’s stature. That our companions still existed largely within the boundaries of mortal measurement was a reflection of their lack. They should have loomed over us in every aspect. They should have towered-

“Take my seat,” Orpheus told me. I blinked, looking up at him strangely. Though he couldn’t have possibly seen my expression behind the midnight veil of the raven, he seemed to infer it anyway.

“Take my seat and give me yours,” he bid me again. “You want to be center stage, don’t you?”

I stood. At my full height, the crown of my head only just reached the Augur’s collarbone. He was as tall compared to me as my father would be compared to him. He sat unceremoniously on the throne of my pankration hands, and I took his place atop his tomb. The ivy rustled and shifted as I sat down on it.

I wondered idly if the tomb was empty in this shadowed reflection of the Orphic House. Above and all around, hundreds of spirits stared at me in rapt displeasure.

“How does it feel?” the Augur asked me. I hummed, considering their glares and simmering disdain.

“I’m not against it.”

“You can stay there, if you’d like,” he offered, and I saw dozens of long dead souls visibly bite down on their protestations. “The lyre is properly tuned, and there are picks hidden in the ivy if you prefer to use one. Play us a song.”

I picked up the golden instrument, weighed it in my hands and considered its scarlet strings. I tucked the tip of my finger beneath one, pulling it back. What sound would the lyre make, I wondered, when it was a Philosopher plucking the strings instead of the Augur?

Rather than release it, my finger slowly returned the straining scarlet string to its original position. I pulled my hand away without it making a sound.

“I can’t,” I decided. “Not like you.”

“Why not? You have everything you need, do you not?”

My head tilted.

“You’re sitting in a Hero’s seat,” Orpheus explained. Familiar eyes of scarlet flame danced as he leaned back and made himself comfortable in my pankration palms. You have a Hero’s instrument at hand, and you bear the mark of higher power’s blessing. That should be enough to do what I do, shouldn’t it?”

The founder of the Orphic mysteries raised an eyebrow when I didn’t reply.

“Is it not enough?” he asked me knowingly.

“How long have you been listening to us?” Sol asked him.

“Since you plucked that first cord.”

“Liar.”

More than one restless spirit came to their feet in the stands and elevated balconies, their outrage clear to see. Orpheus raised a hand without looking back, forestalling them.

“What did you call me?” he asked Sol.

Rather than repeat himself, the raven from Rome returned his fingers to the smoke serving as his lyre’s strings. Sol played three simple cords, the sound traveling to every corner of the singing house, carried by its fine acoustics. The sound of them was shrill, more so than the first song he’d played to grab the Augur’s attention.

Orpheus leaned an elbow onto the open air, scarlet flames burning behind his eyes, and laid his cheek against a loosely clenched fist.

“That’s twice,” he said, though Sol hadn’t spoken a word. “Call me a liar in my own home one more time.”

“Can you really understand my intent to that degree?” Sol asked. He sounded like he wanted to disbelieve it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to. When Orpheus nodded, he sighed. “What about Griffon? He only spoke once between my first cord and your invitation to take the stage, and that was just to call me rude. You’re the Keeper of Strings, you can hear the words the lyre says in my place, fine - but he hasn’t plucked a single string in this house. What voice spoke for him that you could hear his underlying intent?”

“This voice,” Orpheus spoke, and laid his unoccupied hand over his heart.

“Is this a joke?” I asked incredulously. “You heard my heart speak?”

“It wasn’t as if I had a choice. It’s all but screaming.”

“Your myth didn’t mention an ability like that.” Sol’s veiled head turned to me, seeking confirmation. I shook my head. “Is that a chthonic ability?”

“No,” Orpheus said at once, but decided against it a moment later. “Well, it shouldn’t be. These days, though… maybe so.”

My heart and Sol for a straight answer.

“Where do the two of you stand?” Orpheus abruptly asked, spearing first me and then Sol with pointed expectation.

“What does my heart say?” I asked blithely.

“It says it’s disappointed. It says it aches to burn. Mostly, it despairs that the brightest souls are the ones that are smothered first. It’s been saying that since I first started listening. So, again - where do you stand?”

“… Sophic Realm. Second rank.”

“Sophic Realm, first rank,” Sol chimed in.

“I thought so. Tell me, what do the two of you think a Hero is?”

Sol and I shared a look through veils of raven shadow.

“There are no wrong answers,” Orpheus said invitingly. I grimaced. Was he a liar that had been listening to us in the underworld all this time, or was it sheer coincidence? To what extent was my virtuous heart betraying me?

“More,” I said. If he was telling the truth, it was all that needed to be said.

Once more, Sol turned to his lyre in place of words. The song he drew next from the smoke was slow and somber, each cord a bittersweet pleasure. Chthonic souls leaned forward on their benches and over the rails of their balconies to listen as it dragged tortuously on. I saw the late Ptolemy watching raptly, his sister-wife listening with her eyes closed and her back pressed against his chest.

Sol curled his fingers against his palms when the last string was plucked, scraping them as if to rid them of a residue that he misliked.

“So that’s it,” Orpheus murmured, as if he really had heard the full explanation in the intervening beats. “That song, was it your own creation? Or does it have a name?”

“The Trojan Marches Home,” Sol answered. A song about Aeneas, then. Fitting choice, for a Roman.

“Thank you,” Orpheus said genuinely. “I’ll remember it.” Sol inclined his head, and this time a few scattered applause came down from the stands. He didn’t look back. “To the prior point, however, I think I’ve spotted the issue. You’re both horribly confused and unsure of how to proceed with your lives as they stand, and you’ve come here in search of clarity using gold and wine as your thin pretense. Not uncommon, as these approaches go.”

“If our hearts’ desires are so transparent to you,” I said, the raven’s distortion veil doing nothing to hide my irritation, “Why don’t you humor us, and fulfill them?”

“Why should I?”

“Sol played you a nice song.”

Orpheus chuckled. “That he did. He even brought his own instrument to perform it.” The Augur leveled a finger at me. The ivy vines enshrouding his tomb shifted in response, digging against my skin where I touched them. “You, on the other hand, refuse to play the one I loaned you myself. How am I to suffer such disparity in my own home?”

“So if I play you a song,” I said slowly, “That would be enough?”

“It would.”

I tapped the face of his lyre thoughtfully. The gold chimed every time my nail struck it.

“I still refuse.”

“Just play the man a song,” the Roman raven snapped, as if I was one of his toy soldiers to command. “Don’t tell me the young aristocrat doesn’t know how to strum a lyre.”

“Of course I do.”

“Then play.”

“No.”

Sol threw down his ivory lyre in disgust. Rather than rebound off the wooden stage, though, it simply fell into his shadow and vanished. Like a broken ship subsumed by wine-dark waters.

“You know you won’t do it justice,” Orpheus surmised. Or perhaps he’d heard it in my heart. Who was to say? “An alternative, then. You lack the required finesse in your strings, but what of your voice?”

“There isn’t one better in all the world.”

“Oh?” Scarlet flames flickered, amused. “And under it?”

“Not there either.”

“Oh ho. That’s a claim I’d love to hear proven.” The Hero Orpheus made a beckoning motion with one hand, and ivy vines entangled the golden lyre, dragged it out of my lap. I watched, nonplussed, as they grew across the gap between Orpheus and his coffin to hand over the instrument. “Lend me your voice, Lio Aetos, and open your heart. I’ll supply you the lyrics.”

Before I could ask him what exactly he meant by that, the Augur began to play. It was as lovely as his earlier play, but this tune didn’t flow placidly through the undercurrent of conversation like the one before. These cords were not content to be spoken over. They thrummed, bright and proud, echoing through the rafters of the high house. They seized the ears of every spectator in the odeon.

They seized me. And not unlike the first time I had felt the brush of pneuma on my cultivator’s sense, not unlike the first time I noticed the thrust of rhetoric with my sophic sense, I felt something beat against my chest. Something directly outside of the cage that contained my heart. Something that wanted in.

Orpheus the Augur- no. Orpheus, the Keeper of Scarlet Strings, matched his beat and the scarlet flames in his eyes to the rhythm and heat of my own heart. Through that resonance, he spoke to me.

He spoke through me.

My voice rose to sing a hymn I had never heard before this moment.

Zagreus I call, loud-sounding and divine, fanatic vine-keeper, a two-fold shape is thine:

Thy various names and attributes I sing, O, first-born, thrice begotten, Bacchic king:

Rural, ineffable, two-form'd, obscure, two-horn'd, with ivy crown'd, euion, pure.

Bull-fac'd, and martial, bearer of the vine, endu'd with counsel prudent and divine:

Triennial, whom the leaves of vines adorn, of Thunderer and Kore, occultly born.

Immortal dæmon, hear my suppliant voice, give me in blameless plenty to rejoice;

And listen gracious to my mystic pray'r, surrounded with thy choir of nurses fair.

The stands erupted into cheering ovation. I hunched forward, panting - abruptly breathless. Such a short hymn shouldn’t have taken anything noticeable out of me to recite. But it had. I gasped for breath while Orpheus set down his golden lyre and joined the rest of the dead souls in applauding me.

Sol’s hand was a firm support as it settled on my shoulder. His voice was colder than ice when he spoke to the Augur, made more unsettling by the raven’s grim distortion.

“What did you do?”

“I said a prayer.” Orpheus shrugged lightly, unconcerned by the raven’s rising pneuma. “The two of you are strangers in my home, and so I have treated you well despite the insults you’ve offered me. You wear the colors of an old and dear friend, and so I’ve decided to answer your irreverent questions. But make no mistake. You are not my friends. And if your bodies can not handle the answers your hearts have requested, that is your hubris repaid.”

“I’m fine,” I wheezed, bracing a hand on my knee and clapping Sol’s bicep reassuringly. “I can-“ I gagged. Forced myself to speak through the sensation. “-feel it now. It’s-”

“I’d suggest catching your breath,” Orpheus interrupted. “The first time is-“

I jabbed a finger at his face. “You. Augur. Shut up.”

In an instant, the goodwill my singing had garnered me in the stands evaporated. More than that, though, for the first time since our arrival I saw the Chthonic Hero himself grow angry.

“Excuse me?”

I sucked in a long, whistling breath that felt like it would never fill my lungs. Until it did, and the breathless spell passed. I slapped my chest and the winding scarlet tattoos that the raven’s mantle brought to the surface of my skin flashed briefly.

“You’re too loud. I’m trying to listen,” I explained. The Augur’s anger subsided.

“Listen to what?” Sol asked quietly, still gripping my shoulder.

“To the heart.”

With a sense I hadn’t known I had until Orpheus forced it upon me with his prayer, I felt it. A warmth, and a beat. A deathless phenomena entombed in poisonous ivy.

The Orphic mystery.

Drink.

My brow furrowed.

“The heart? What heart?”

Drink.

“Griffon?”

Drink.

I shook my head. No.

Drink.

I refuse.

“He won’t stop,” Orpheus said knowingly. He was standing, now. At some point my pankration hands had flickered and vanished, leaving him without a seat. He didn’t seem concerned by it. “He’s always been that way. Best to just drain your cup and be done with it.”

DRINK.

I grit my teeth, gripping my head for all the good it did. Obnoxious tyrant. Be silent.

D R I N K

My knees hit the floor. Moments after discovering it, my new sense was overwhelmed by the entombed beat. I was blinded, deafened - disheartened.

Sol gripped my jaw, forcing my mouth open, and poured the horn’s contents down my throat. It was sweet and nothing but. Utterly lacking in any of the underlying burn inherent to alcoholic beverages. I had seen the same liquid in every ivory cup, in every drunken spirit’s hand.

Milk and honey. It was only milk and honey.

Where was the wine?

The last thing I saw before the world fell out from under me and all of my senses spiraled away was the sight of Sol shifting his midnight veil aside to down the contents of his own horn cup.

The last thing I heard was Orpheus’ voice.

“Enjoy the rites, boys.”

1.86

The Son of Rome

I’d never cared for the lyre before meeting Aristotle.

As the Young Patrician of a notable family, I was raised under a certain set of expectations. It was a given that I would be educated. It was all but guaranteed, looking back at my father and my great-uncle’s careers, that I would serve my time in the legions and make the climb up the cursus honorum. How far I progressed in the end was something no one could predict, but it was a safe bet that I would claim that first honor if not any more to follow.

It wasn’t enough to be learned if a man intended to take up the reins of the Republic, even if only in a senator's small way. It wasn’t enough to serve. Those things were required but not enough alone. In order to carry forward what the greatest statesmen of the past had entrusted to us, a man had to embody the virtues that defined his city.

The Greeks possessed four cardinal virtues, four that defined their cultural identity and sculpted the greatest of their sons and daughters: Temperance. Wisdom. Courage. And of course, Justice.

Just as there were eight rounds in the progression of a Roman soul to contrast the four a Greek traversed, so too was the Republic defined by eight virtues instead of the Greek cardinals.

Virtus Integritas. The complete virtues - four for the city and four for the man. It was a given that a Roman statesman would embody at least one of these eight qualities, And that expectation only grew higher as they progressed up the course of honors.

The four for the city were the highest social virtues, the qualities that a man extended to his fellow Romans whether they were patrician or plebian.

First of the four was Honestas, the honor that a man wore like a triumphal crown. It was his reputation in the eyes of the state, and if his heart was true then Honestas was his pride just the same.

Fides, the good faith that a man acted with at all times. His reliability to the ones that served beneath him, and his loyalty to the ones that stood above.

Innocentia, the selflessness with which a man pursued the interests of his city. It was the charities born of his easy generosity, and it was the simplicity that made his soul so utterly incorruptible.

And finally, there was Iustitia. A man’s justice, fourth of the four and brother to the Greek cardinal virtue. It was a man’s empathy for those wronged in the Republic, for the Republic - even, at times, by the Republic. It was his sense of equity and his ever unsatisfied desire for structured order. Most importantly, it was the responsibility he took when the burden of judgement was laid at his feet. His acceptance of whatever followed.

If the four virtues that a Roman citizen kept for himself - pure Salubritas, dutiful Pietas, resolute Constantia, and heavy Disciplina - were internal qualities, expectations he had of himself, then the four social virtues were the external qualities that his people and his city could expect from him. And did expect, more so the higher he climbed. The internal virtues had been hammered into me and pressure treated by the soldiers and centurions of the fifth legion that my father had entrusted me to.

The social virtues, generally speaking, required a softer touch. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you asked, Aristotle was the one that shaped me to them. From the day he caught me picking pockets in the forum to the day he saw me off to the legions, beginning and ending with justice. The overlap of twin excellence between our two cultures.

Aristotle had opened my eyes in more ways than one, exposed me to aspects of myself and the world around me that I had never before considered in my brief life. He had taught me lessons that no other man in Rome could have conveyed, in large part because he was the only man my mother would not mutilate for sending me home from a lesson bruised and bleeding. Back then, irreverent little bastard that I was, I had tried more than once to have my pitiless mentor fired. No matter what I said, though, my mother would only stroke my head and tell me to bear with it.

In time I’d let go of my resentment and became grateful for her sudden shift to firmness, but I never did understand it. Not in the legions, nor in the Scarlet City. It wasn’t until I went to Olympia and met the mentor of his mentor, until I saw for myself the depths of his resolve in the story of the brothers Aetos, that I finally understood why even my adoring mother would not deprive me of his teachings.

It was all but guaranteed that a Young Patrician would receive a fine education. For the Young Patrician of a family as infamous and esteemed as mine, even the finest education a Roman could give wouldn’t be out of the question.

But I had received neither. Instead, I had been given one of the finest educations in the world. As mad as it seemed, I shared a mentor with the same Damon Aetos that haunted the free Mediterranean nearly twenty years after his withdrawal from it. I was a link in the chain that went all the way back up to the Scholar himself. No one, Greek or Roman or savage barbarian, was guaranteed such a mentor.

What had I done to deserve such an education? Nothing. And what have I done with it? Even less than that.

That wasn’t Aristotle’s fault, though. He had done what he could with me, and corrected as many of my ugly traits as he could. If I had been better from the beginning, I knew in my heart and the marrow of my bones that I could have learned so much more. Even still, Aristotle had accounted for my feelings and instilled in me skills and qualities that would benefit me regardless of whether I fully understood the reasoning behind them.

Such as the lyre.

“You must be-“

“Thyoneus’-”

“Lampter’s-”

“Lyaeus’-”

“Melanaegis’-”

“Eleuthereus’ boys!”

Pleasantries came and went and came again, a dozen introductions and pithy conversations, followed by a dozen more. It seemed like every chthonic spirit saw a different face in the cowls of the ravens, remembered a different man that surely must have sent us in his place. Some greeted us with naked joy, others with thinly veiled hostility, but curiosity was universal.

Young blood, the late Ptolemy had called us. I supposed that made the chthonic revelers the sharks.

“No,” replied the tattooed raven by my side. “Never heard of him,” he informed another spirit. “Disgusting lush. Close your mouth when it’s full,” he said to the next, smacking the man lightly on his shoulder as we passed to take the sting out of his words. The man’s friends jeered at him while we continued on, prodding his flushed cheeks and snatching the grapes off his plate.

Griffon navigated through a symposia attended only by the dead like it was the most natural thing in the world to him, as if he had been raised for environments like these. In some ways, he had. Though he may have cast off his status as Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn, he still carried that upbringing with him wherever he went. It revealed itself in the elegance of his speech, betrayed him even while uttering the foulest sentiment. It was there when he walked, in the commanding swagger of his stride. It was in his eyes most of all. In their distant amusement - and in their disdain.

I ignored the pleasantries that I could and allowed Griffon to engage with the rest, because even though we had both enjoyed the privilege of a sophisticated upbringing, I have never been the man that thrives in social waters. At best I could keep my head above the current and avoid shaming myself. I was no author of conversational flow, never the man whose word commanded every ear in the room. Not like my father had been, and certainly not like Gaius or Aristotle. That was Griffon’s domain more than it had ever been mine.

Aristotle had identified this failing early on, blaming it often and in a tone of long-suffering on the poison of a doting mother and the cruel praise of sycophants. Prior to becoming his student, I had been surrounded by the children of lesser patrician families and enjoyed the delusion that they listened intently when I spoke because I was worth listening to. I allowed them to convince me day after day that they agreed with me because I was convincing, and not simply because their parents had urged them to find my good graces.

A boy whose age could still be counted on his fingers, and I had been convinced that I was already a paragon of social virtue. When Aristotle had challenged me to match action to words, bundled me up in anonymous rags and taken me to the forum, there had been no doubt in my mind that I would carry whatever conversation he had me take part in.

To this day, the memory still ached.

That was the day that Aristotle showed me the immensity of the gap between the boy I truly was and the socialite I had always thought myself to be. I never forgot that lesson, only learned it again and again as time went on. Eventually, when comparing myself to my role models became too painful, I gave up on my rhetoric all together. Though by this point I was aware of how shameful my past behaviors had been, I regressed anyway, fell back on familiar petulance and refused to engage with Aristotle‘s lessons on discourse and persuasion.

I even used the benefits of his other lessons against him. No matter how many times he smacked me around, no matter how deeply he cut me with his words, I only drew the bruises and the reprimands around me like a cloak. Stacked them like bricks between me and him and refused to come out from behind them.

So, being that I was a stubborn child and he was as wise as he was impatient, Aristotle changed his approach. Rather than try to scale the wall I had built between us, or perhaps break it down, he instead bypassed it all together.

Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, he never stopped tutoring me in the sphere of social grace. He simply approached it from a different angle. From the side.

First, he taught me how to play the lyre.

The melody drifting up from the sunken stage did not disrupt the flow of any of the conversations taking place in the odeon, nor was it muffled or overburdened by the various songs being simultaneously sung. Orpheus’ strumming did not disrupt the flow, nor was it disrupted by it, because here in the Orphic House it was the flow. The rhythm and the ambience that the chthonic spirits in attendance were matching themselves to was the product of an instrument that could be made from a tortoise shell and sheep guts. The great Hero didn’t have to say a word to hold the entire singing house in his open palm.

Rhetoric was the art of persuasion, and the conveyance of intent. Nothing more and nothing less. Some men, like Aristotle, conveyed the contents of their soul through the spoken word. Others, like Alexander the Conqueror, persuaded through overwhelming force. Through words, through actions, through music and acting and art. There were an endless number of tools that a man could use to make himself understood, eloquently and with grace.

The lyre was one of those tools. The first, but far from the only one. Aristotle had pressed as many of those tools as he could into my hands before my father took me on campaign, and Gaius had done what he could in the years that followed to refine my skills with them. And in time, leading the way by example, to make me at least passable in my areas of greatest lack.

I would never take to these environments the way that Griffon did, with ease and clear relish, but I could avoid embarrassing myself. With the proper tools, and in the proper circumstances, I could convey my intent as eloquently as any Young Aristocrat.

And about as boldly, too.

Every voice in the singing house went silent when I plucked my first string.

The Orphic House was small even for an odeon. Still, it contained seating enough for hundreds of spectators, and every one of those seats was currently filled. Dozens of conversations and songs, spoken in a vast array of languages from the mouths of men and women all over the world. All of them, every single one, slammed to a dead halt as I began to strum an instrument that I had not possessed only moments before.

Down on his stage, the fingers of the late Hero Orpheus paused on his strings. He looked up for the first time since our arrival, puzzled. I felt his eyes on me, felt the brush of his influence against my raven attire not as the touch of a hand, but more like the dissonant chill a lingering hand left behind when it withdrew.

I focused on my strings and worked to fill the horrified silence. My seat was less a dedicated space and more a gap in the benches created by a wooden support beam. Leaning back against it, I did what I could to convey myself to the late Hero.

This is outrageously rude, Griffon remarked, leaning against the same vertical beam and crossing his arms. Bemused, but curious enough to let me finish. Just as before.

In both of the stories I had heard about the Augur the last couple days, first from Griffon and then from the Thracians standing guard outside the Orphic House, a special emphasis had been placed on the chthonic Hero’s appeal. Charming to the point of absurdity. Charming beyond that point, at times. To charm an animal with music was a less likely prospect than charming a man, but not impossible.

Charming the earth, though? Charming sticks and stones so they would avoid his face when thrown at him? That was ridiculous. Utterly absurd.

Entirely Greek.

Aristotle had taught me all that he could, and evidently it had been enough to leave its mark in the foundations of my soul. But I still felt like a foreigner in this culture that was at least nominally a part of me. I still didn’t know enough. I was still grasping, blindly, in the shadows.

I understood intuitively the difference between myself and a man like Gaius. In theory, I knew what it would take to progress through the course of honors, what it would take to see the succession of my Roman soul to its end. It was because of that understanding that I knew that way was lost to me now. Succession was no longer possible, which meant refinement was my only hope. The Greek path to ascension.

What did that entail, though? The more I learned the less I understood. Reason, spirit, and hunger. Principle, passion, and purpose. Discoveries, deeds, and domains. Philosopher. Hero. Tyrant. There was no unified path to heaven if you traveled the Greek way, and the most successful of the culture’s cultivators were considered utterly mad by the standards of even their own people - even their own brothers.

Socrates had advised me to strengthen my body after he thrashed Griffon and I, but was that because the Greek way demanded it or simply to combat the burden my Roman virtue imposed upon me? The Gadfly had warned me not to take my Roman virtue for granted while among Greeks, but he hadn’t offered any specifics as to why. Because he himself didn’t know where one half of me ended and the other began.

I was a Philosopher of the first rank by the standards of a Greek, yet I had stood above the Roman equivalent of that the day the fifth legion fell and Damon Aetos took me into his city. How can I progress one way but not another? What had I done to progress through the Greek Civic realm before I knew I was even a part of it? How did life in the Roman military translate to Greek philosophy? What had I done before? What did I have to do now?

I hadn’t been lying when I promised our Heroic companions that I would do whatever it took to see Carthage destroyed. The Roman way was closed off to me, but every Greek stands alone against the wrath of raging heaven. Whatever was required, I would see it done if it meant I could stand alone in fields of salt and ash. I’d do it if it meant I could drag the stars down from heaven, like Griffon’s father had so casually done, onto the heads of every cursed dog.

But I only vaguely knew what was needed. There was no marked road to follow, especially not for me. There was a suggestion of structure, I could almost see it, but every time I thought I nearly had it something would take me by the shoulders and rattle my brain in my skull. An old man would grab me by the head and leap up a fucking mountain like he was vaulting a rose bush, or the insatiable Young Aristocrat that called me his brother would casually reveal to me a fever dream of his uncles and father burning a ship to make it steadier at sea, fighting dragon spirits with wooden blades, and manifesting a hand of scarlet glory the size of a city to simply… pick up an island.

It wasn’t that the Greeks were stronger than the legions in their prime. Even now, I knew that like I knew that water was wet. It was just that they were so godforsakenly ridiculous about it.

What did I need to do to become a man like Damon Aetos, or the late Tyrant of Tyrants himself? How much of Bakkhos’ strength was a product of the nectar he so jealously hoarded, and how much of it was due to some other absurdity? I had agreed to this errand quest because as far as I could tell, each explanation was as likely as the other.

Who could say how it was a Greek became strong? Certainly not me. What was the difference between a genius and a madman, in a world where man could defy nature's wrath if he was compelling enough about it? What separated a Hero from the souls both above and below them, that they alone could linger centuries after their death in a house built out of repurposed wagons for any baffled Roman or irreverent Greek to wander by and see?

Are we the shadows, Sol?

How much of this path was an illusion? Where did the shadows end and the light begin to shine? How far could I progress off of implication alone? Instinct by itself couldn’t possibly be enough, or else every man would end up a god eventually, but nothing else felt real when I grasped it in my hands.

Maybe I was the man that cast the shadow on the wall of the cave, or maybe I was nothing but the silhouette. If that was the case, why shouldn’t I be able to do something that should’ve been impossible, for no other reason then because it was enthralling?

If the Greek approach was nothing but flash and illusory thunder, it followed that I should be able to change the shape of my shadow if I only adjusted my silhouette and let the light catch it from a different angle. Shift my stance - physical, mental, spiritual. Contort myself until it hurt.

And lo, there upon the wall, something that looks nearly like a lyre is in my shadow’s hands.

I plucked and strummed an ivory lyre that I’d pulled from the shadows, one that I had not put there first or ever seen before, and the sound of it was deceivingly sweet. I put everything I had into its wispy shadow strings, conveying through melody alone  the reason why I had come to this place. I put all of my confusion, my uncertainty, and my desperation for clarity into my song, and I willed the chthonic Hero to understand it.

Aristotle had told me once that a song was at times a better conveyance than any spoken words. I had seen enough of his culture to take that sentiment literally now.

I played my last bewildered cord and weathered Griffon’s solitary applause. Looking up, I locked eyes with the Hero Orpheus down on his stage.

He was smiling.

“It seems you have some questions,” he said, because of course he’d understood. He raised his golden lyre to his forehead in a friendly salute and beckoned us down with a voice like molten honey. “Come, friends, and join me on stage. It’s been far too long since I’ve spoken to a raven.”

1.85

The Young Griffon

First, we mingled.

There was a certain etiquette that even a dead man could be expected to follow. In a theater, it was common sense that the stage belonged to those performing. A spectator could heckle if the act warranted it, but you never joined the actors on the stage unless you were first invited. In a symposium, although the lounges might be arranged around the room with equal prominence, a partygoer did not approach the organizer of the event while he was otherwise preoccupied.

The details were different but the sentiment remained the same. Engagement was acceptable. Interruption was not.

This was neither a symposia nor a theater, but something in between. Therefore it could be argued that both etiquettes applied. Of course, it could also be argued that neither did. However, the fact that the Augur sat alone on his ivy tomb down on center stage, unapproached and unspoken to, made me suspect the former over the latter.

Never let it be said that the young Griffon of the risen sun was entirely without manners. Sol and I stepped carefully through the horseshoe tiers of benches while chthonic men and women chattered and laughed and intermittently sang. All the while, the low strumming of the lyre served as an undercurrent to every conversation and song.

It was easy to leave him to his music when the sound of it was so pleasant.

“Newcomers, eh?” spoke a man out of time as Sol and I leaned against a thick wooden beam. A handful of the revelers surrounding him looked curiously our way as well. His companions, or at least his afterlife acquaintances.

“First time,” I confirmed, the sound distorted by the sheer midnight veil that covered my face.

“I thought as much. It’s been some time since we’ve seen rags like those.” He glanced up thoughtfully, at the same time nudging a woman sitting next to him close enough for their thighs to touch. “How long has it been since we’ve seen a raven, darling? Three hundred years? Four hundred?”

“At least two thousand,” the woman said, looking back at him like he was simple.

“Impossible.”

“You’re both wrong,” another man a few spots down piped up, leaning forward to look down the row at us. “It’s been four thousand bare minimum.” The first man to speak and the woman beside him both rolled their eyes.

“Right,” the first man drawled. “And I’m the king of Egypt.”

“In your dreams, perhaps!” came a voice from up above, a man on one of the torchlit balconies looking down on us with his crossed arms on the rail and an ivory cup dangling negligently from two fingers.

My eyes lingered on his features. Black curls of hair and pale skin, almond-shaped eyes a dull brown-black, and a strong jaw untouched by any beard. His nose gave him away most clearly of all. He was a Macedonian. Yet, his eyes were lined and shadowed the same twilight blue shade as his painted lips, and in place of any armor or cloak he wore only a belted skirt of pleated linen - and, of all things, a juvenile elephant’s scalp as a mantle.

Macedonian features. Egyptian fashion.

“No one’s speaking to you, Philadelphus,” a different woman shot back at him, throwing a handful of figs up at his face. The Macedonian in Egyptian clothes caught one of the projectile fruits in his teeth and bit down on it with pleasure, letting the juice fall freely back down onto the woman’s head.

“What brings the young blood to this humble theater?” the man named Philadelphus asked us curiously, while he chewed on his fig and the woman below him spat curses and threw more fruit at his balcony. “Business or pleasure?”

“Business,” Sol said, at the same time that I answered with ‘Pleasure’. Philadelphus raised a sculpted eyebrow.

“It seems your purposes conflict.”

“One raven speaks only the truth,” I said lightly, “the other raven lies.”

“I despise you,” Sol said with remarkable conviction.

I waved. “See?”

“Pleasure disguised as business,” Philadelphus said understandingly. He rolled his wrist, lazily saluting us with his ivory cup. “That’s my favorite sort of work.”

“We know,” one of the hecklers seated around us groused. He ignored them as easily as he breathed.

“Tell me, young blood - how goes the campaign? Is the wheel still turning, or has the king of kings come home?”

“Alexander is dead,” Sol answered. Philadelphus threw back his head and laughed. It reverberated through the rafters above, a rich and rolling sound.

“You are the liar, aren’t you? At least try and make it a challenge - that’s half the fun of the whole charade.”

“The Conqueror is dead? Truly?” the first man to speak to us on the benches spoke up, hope and a vicious, building joy bringing him halfway to his feet. If his Peloponnesian accent and burning heart flames had not already given away his heritage, his reaction to Sol’s statement certainly would have.

“You’ve seen his corpse yourself?” the woman who had been sitting with her thighs pressed to his piped up next, reaching out to grasp Sol’s forearm. “You’re certain?”

I dipped the tips of my fingers into the cool white liquid that my horn cup contained, and I flicked the droplets that clung to my skin at the pale woman. One drop, perhaps two, landed on her outstretched arm.

The chthonic Heroine shrieked as if burned and jerked away from us both, tumbling over the side of her bench and down into the lower tiers. Several long-dead souls from all walks of this life shouted and groaned as she knocked the food and drink from their hands. Her man shot us an ugly look, burning eyes darting down to the horn cups in our hands before he decided against a fight and turned down the stands to assist his woman.

The man up on the balcony watched them go with naked amusement. Drawn by the noise, a woman appeared next to him to peer out over the balcony. She had the same dark features as the man with the elephant scalp, the same nose and almond shaped eyes, as well as the same Egyptian garb - the key difference being the curling Ram’s horns behind her ears in place of an elephant scalp mantle. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, it was unmistakable that they were related.

Philadelphus wrapped an arm around his sister’s waist and pulled her flush against his side. She laid an idle hand against his stomach and let it drift languidly down.

My nose wrinkled.

“Egyptians,” Sol muttered like a curse.

“Young blood, after all this time,” Philadelphus’ sister remarked wonderingly, her eyes drifting over us each in turn. “You must be Oinops’ boys.”

Oinops. Wine-dark.

“That was my thought as well,” Philadelphus agreed. He rolled his wrist again, this time urging me on with the motion. “Go on then. I’ve heard the raven’s lie. I’m ready for the raven’s truth. Where is Alexander now?”

I shrugged. “India swallowed him up nearly three hundred years ago. The western world has not seen him since.”

“The wheel keeps on spinning,” Philadelphus mused, disappointed but unsurprised. “In that case I’ll leave you to it. Don’t have too much fun, eh?”

Sol was already walking away, towards the other side of the horseshoe tier rather than down. I was halfway to his side when the Macedonian in Egyptian garb tossed something at my head.

I caught the necklace, a simple string of leather contrasted by a fine tablet of gold dangling from it instead of a jewel or beads. I blinked, reading the words inscribed on the small slip of gold.

I am the son of earth and starry heaven, but of heaven is my birth…

Another necklace of similar design hurtled at me a moment later and was caught. I tilted my head back to the balcony, where Philadelphus and his sister were lounging against their rail. Philadelphus raised his ivory cup in another lazy salute. His sister winked conspiratorially.

“A gift for the young blood. You’ll need those sooner or later, where you’re going.”

I considered the totenpass skeptically. “I don’t intend to die.”

“Neither did I,” Philadelphus said easily. “Yet here I am regardless. If not as a necessity, then take it as a gift. A token for the new initiates of our humble Orphic faith.”

Well, that changed things.

The golden tablet clinked musically against the ruby of the necklace I’d stolen from the Aetos filial pools. Sol had already made it to the other side of the horseshoe tier now, and had somehow been roped into a conversation by what looked to be a gaggle of hetairai. If his stiff posture and white-knuckled grip on his horn cup was any indicator, he was in need of rescue.

As I waved and departed, Philadelphus called out one more time from his balcony.

“The next time you’re in Alexandria, deliver my warm regards to whichever dim descendent sits the pharaoh’s throne. Let them know they’re a disappointment to Ptolemy when you arrive, and remind them once more of it before you go.”

“How do you know they’ll be a disappointment?” I asked him over my shoulder.

“Isn’t it obvious? Because I’m the greatest of my line, and it was their misfortune to be born after me!”

I laughed.

1.84

The Son of Rome

“If we’re going,” Scythas said, when the story had been told and the last strings plucked, “this is the time. And the hand guided me here, Solus. I promise you, if the reagent the Gadfly needs is anywhere in this nation, it’s here.” There was an undercurrent of desperation to the words. He wanted me to believe him, to believe in him, and worried that I wouldn’t.

From the beginning, I had seen a downtrodden reflection in him. A soldier that wanted nothing more than to be accepted into the ranks. To stand shoulder to shoulder with his peers and know that no matter how miserable the road ahead might be, he would not have to march it on his own. An outcast in search of belonging.

In the past, I might have been able to offer him that. Before, I could have brought him into the fold of a fraternal band unsurpassed among heaven and earth. But those days were gone. All I could offer him now was the bare minimum.

Scythas desired a Heroic peer by his side, that much was painfully apparent. He deserved the support that could only be found in the press of a shield wall. Brotherhood baptized in war. He needed it, for what he had ahead of him.

A first rank Philosopher with fractured foundations was a poor substitute for either of those things. It was all that I could offer him.

“I trust you,” I told him, nodding once. The relief that overtook him at the words was painful to see.

Griffon ascended up the wooden steps without a word, a pensive air about him. As he passed between the two Thracians guarding the entrance to the singing house, the woman with shadows painted around her eyes and on her lips offered up her horn cup.

“For your thirst,” she offered. Griffon didn’t stop or look back, but one of his pankration hands took it and carried it up behind him.

“This is where we part ways,” I informed the black stallion that had served me thus far, more or less against his will. Dismounting, I stepped around the charger and met it glare for glare. The stallion’s nostrils flared threateningly.

“I have never seen such hatred in a horse before,” I confessed, as if it could understand me. “But I’ve seen your rage. I’ve seen that hungry look before.”

Before a Roman could lead his fellow man, he first had to master his horse. I had served as an equite long before I ever gave a legionary an order. To commemorate my promotion to the patrician rank of mounted cavalry, my great uncle had gifted me a horse himself. More than that, he had gifted me his own horse. A midnight charger, fearless and angrier than any I had ever seen before. When we took to the field, it felt less like I was driving him forward, and more like he was pulling me in his wake.

Taking Caesar’s horse into battle had felt like riding a hurricane wind. Like the righteous fury of the Republic itself was delivering me forward. Without fear or hesitation, no matter what dark barbarism opposed us.

I had felt something nearly similar while suffering the Thracian stallion. The rage, though, was aimless and tainted by hatred. The beast’s belligerence was untempered. It did not fear because it had never encountered something worth fearing, not because it was brave. Maybe those imperfections could have been sanded away with time. A firm hand might have been enough.

It was too late for that now, though.

“It’s a shame,” I said quietly, gripping the back of the stallion’s neck and dragging it down to my level. Its fierce yellow eyes narrowed. “You’d have been happier at war.”

I turned away and climbed the steps, accepting the offered horn cup from the Thracian man with the tattooed scalp as I passed him. Scythas followed close behind, along with a girl that had covered herself with rags of anonymity as we approached and hadn’t made a sound since. We only had three horses to pay with, after all. One of us would have to sneak in. Thankfully, the philosopher’s rags were as effective now as they had been on the Eos-

“You haven’t paid, girl,” the Thracian woman said, glancing lazily sideways, directly at Selene.

The daughter of the Oracle froze. Scythas tensed, inhaling quietly and gathering his Heroic pneuma around himself. By this point, Griffon had reached the top of the steps and laid his palms flat against the gated doors of the singing house. So close.

“The stallion is worth two,” the scarlet son said. He turned his head just enough to regard the woman with a single scarlet eye.

She hummed. Shared a look with her fellow Thracian.

And shrugged.

“I suppose it is. Enjoy the Orphic House.”

Griffon snorted and pressed open the ivory gates leading into the decrepit theater of repurposed wood, striding inside. We followed him through.

Into the shadows.

§

We called him the Augur because he sang like a bird, and fortune followed him wherever he went.

His name was Orpheus, and there has never been a man more nimble with a lyre - mortal or divine. He could charm anything with those heavenly strings. Men, women, and children. Animals of every kind. Even the stones in the earth and the trees reaching fruitlessly up to the skies were helplessly enamored when he played.

He was a “kyrios” in his own right, you know. The founder and the prophet of a many-faced faith, our own Orphic mysteries. In the course of his years he erected more cults than there are greater Greek mysteries, and each time he did it himself - personally. He would find himself a sturdy place to sit wherever in the world he happened to be, and he would begin to pick and strum his humble lyre.

He roused the stones beneath the earth. He serenaded the trees that so ensconced him. And while the ivy wound itself adoringly around his arms, he would bid the earth itself to spring up around the subject of Orphic mystery that he had found. And every time, without fail, it would. Mausoleums and master craft estates would simply… grow. Sprout from the earth like vines. A gift from the mother that so loved her child’s music. A token for the Augur.

The earth and all her children mourned the Augur when he died. But none, not even his own people, mourned the Hero Orpheus as deeply as his sworn brother. Bakkhos was the one to find Orpheus torn apart and scattered across the nation of his birth. Over the course of weeks and months, the mad vine keeper walked every step a man could walk in Thracia, gathering up the pieces of the Orphic corpse. Sobbing all the while, loud enough to wake the dead beneath the earth as he passed.

Bakkhos found the last of Orpheus here, the heart of the once great Hero still burning. He dumped the portions of the corpse that he had gathered and remade the Augur for his funeral. When with ivy and vines he bound the pieces together and covered the grotesque lines where they met, creating the facade of an Orpheus at rest - encircled by adoring vines as he had been in life.

The weeping vine keeper placed a coin in Orpheus’ mouth and a drink in his hand, and sent him off to the underworld a Hero made whole once again. In sorrow at his death and joy at his reunion, the earth rose up and enfolded the Orphic corpse in her embrace. A singing house sprung up over the burial mound just as all of the mausoleums and estates of the Orphic mysteries had.

Even the Augur’s swan song carried his charm.

Now, I can see you’re wondering about the contradiction. The story goes that the Orphic house built itself. But, as a Greek surely knows, not every truth is told in the strictest sense. A thing that one man experiences is not necessarily the same as what another will see.

The king of Macedonia came to this place in the earliest course of his campaigns, hardly more than a boy and yet already stronger than any man had a right to be. More fearsome than the mad one, and as brazen as they came. He broke the people of this place over his knee and when the battle was done he dragged their elders and their chiefs to a humble tomb enshrouded in ivy.

He forced old men and warrior kings all to their knees in front of the lonely tomb and demanded to know what they had done to the Orphic House that should have stood over top of it.

Yes. He had heard the story of Orpheus. It was why he’d come in the first place - to pay his respects to the man with the holy hands.

“We beg the Conqueror,” the wise men said, bowing their heads and scraping at the dirt in supplication. The warriors kneeling beside them were still young enough to value their pride, even then, but the elders had lost that along with their eyes.

“Understand that we couldn’t have touched what was never there to begin with,” opined one.

“The Orphic house was never built,” spoke another.

“Some stories are just that,” came a third.

The king of Macedonia, already greater than the greatest of them despite the fact that his years could be counted with fingers and toes, considered their words with reason and grace. Though his generals and his confidants urged him to punish the lot, he instead laid the blade of his sword on the back of a single neck.

Not the leader of the tribe, the king among kings. No. Alexander laid his blade against the neck of the tribe’s oldest man. The one with eyes like curdled milk, whose legs had failed him long before he was forced to kneel.

“You are nomads, are you not?” Alexander asked him, while the wise man’s grandchildren and great grandchildren howled and fought against their bindings.

“We are, young king.”

“When did you come to this place? How long have you been here, that the wheels have fallen off your wagons and such weeds have grown between their boards?”

When the ancient man spoke, even the loudest of his descendants paused their howling shouts. In perfect silence, his voice was only just barely heard.

“My eldest son was only a boy when I brought him here, so long ago that my eyes could still see. We’ve lived in this place ever since.”

“What compelled you to stay here, when no other valley or field could contain your kind for more than a season?”

“Point me to the tomb,” the old man commanded the king, and though the sons of Macedonia bared their teeth and promised him pain for his presumption, the king laid the flat of his blade against the blind man’s cheek and turned his head to face the ivy-covered tomb.

“Does ivy still embrace it?” he asked the king.

“Ivy strangles it,” Alexander answered, and the ground beneath their feet trembled at his ire.

“Ivy protects it,” the ancient Thracian corrected the Macedonian king, against all common sense. “You’ve seen the state of our wagons yourself. The seasons here are not kind, and neither is the passage of time. The ivy preserves the Orphic corpse in its place of rest. There, and nowhere else for days and days at a swift horse’s pace, the ivy grows thick and with purpose.”

The old man reached up and laid frail fingers on the flat face of the king’s blade that was pressed against his cheek. His warrior descendants shouted threats at the king while his junior wisemen pleaded for him to stop. Instead, he traced blind fingers up the blade, to the hilt and the hand that held it. The Macedonian king did not stop him, knowing he had nothing to fear.

When the ancient Thracian found Alexander’s hand, he gripped it tight. The trembling of his own hand had nothing to do with fear or bloodlust. It was simply an effort for a man submerged up to his waist in the underworld.

“Look upon the Augur’s tomb and be at ease. There was truth to the stories you heard. Do not confuse an epic’s exaggeration with falsehood - the echoes of his song may not have been enough to charm an Odeon from the earth, but that ivy shroud is proof he was adored. Look upon it, young king, and see that it’s enough.”

“No,” Alexander decided, withdrawing his blade. “It isn’t.”

Then, to the confusion of all men present, he went to the nearest defunct wagon and heaved it up out of the earth and the vines that had overtaken it. He returned to the tomb and the Thracian leaders awaiting their execution, dropped the wagon unceremoniously to the ground, and went off to grab the next.

Each Macedonian soldier he passed straightened and saluted, but did not ask if he required help. His presence was too vast and unapproachable to the rank and file man. His highest officers, the men that had known him personally as a friend before he was the king, watched him work with calm patience. They knew him well enough to leave him to his inspiration.

When the last wagon had been salvaged and the Thracian leaders had been surrounded by towering piles of time-addled wood, Alexander set about ripping them apart. Plank by plank, with his own two hands.

“What is the young king doing?” The most ancient elder asked, and the Alexander answered for himself.

“The Orphic legend was not wrong, and neither were its details exaggerated. The nature of the tragic resolution is what you and I have misunderstood, elder. I see now that resolution was a prophecy. History’s greatest musician has been waiting all this time on the turning of the wheel.”

The chiefs and lesser elders shared furtive and bewildered looks, while the king’s officers smiled and chuckled knowingly. The ancient Thracian’s blind eyes were thoughtful.

The king continued.

“I have heard the echoes of his swan song, and so I have come. The legend says that the stones themselves could be charmed by Orpheus’ lyre, that all the bounties of the earth were enthralled when he played. So enthralled, in the end, that the earth itself rose up in his absence and built him a singing house, a fell memorial to catch the echoes while he plucked his strings in the underworld.

“I am Alexander, the man who will inherit this earth. The legend says the earth itself will know his charm, and sure enough I was enthralled. The legend swears that Orphic echo will compel the earth to rise and manifest a singing house.”

Alexander, risen king of Macedonia, planted the first weathered plank before the tomb.

“And lo, I’ve come to build it.”

§

Entering the odeon with the Thracian gatekeeper's tale still ringing in my ears, I looked upon the fruits of Alexander’s labor.

“No,” Scythas breathed.

The ivory gates slammed shut behind us.

“It’s empty?” Selene whispered, the scarlet flames behind her eyes shedding some small light on the empty benches and unclaimed seats.

I stopped beside Griffon. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the pensive look in his eyes unchanged. Together, we appraised the odeon’s rundown interior.

Descending tiers of benches built in the Greek inspired Macedonian style made up the bulk of the seating. There were more than a few wooden chairs, though, situated in balconies that looked like they could barely support the dust coating them. Support beams, composed of the thickest portions of a wagon all nailed together, bore the weight that the rafters could not. Cobwebs and wood rot abounded.

The singing house was as quiet as a corpse, and smelled something like one too. The only signs of life lay on the stage at the bottommost tier of the horseshoe benches.

On the tomb, enshrouded by vibrant green ivy.

“Scythas,” Selene spoke up behind us. “Are you sure the hand was pointing you here?”

“It was. I know it was. As soon as I stepped inside I felt it fall away. This is where we’re meant to be. This has to be it.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall passed us, descending down the benches two at a time. Selene followed him, the lights of their heart flames dwindling the further they moved away. Without the rosy light of Griffon‘s palms, the shadows rushed to enclose us in their absence.

“Do we need another sacrifice? Could that be it?” Though she faced away from us, Selene‘s voice carried easily, almost reverberating off the walls and vaulted ceiling.

“I don’t know,” Scythas snapped, the torch lights of his eyes sweeping across the empty stands and unoccupied balconies. “That shouldn’t be it. A sacrifice here… it doesn’t make sense. The way he explained it-”

The Hero froze, and turned to face the ivy tomb atop the stage. He cleared his throat, and spoke his next words in another man’s voice.

“I’ve come to visit, old friend. Care to split a drink?”

The Heroic cultivators below us held their breath, awaiting the chthonic Hero’s response.

In the bleak silence of their eroding hope, Griffon’s raven reached out to mine.

The more I see, the more that I am vexed.

I’ve noticed, I replied, while I watched Scythas’ shoulders slump a fraction more with every passing moment.

I was certain that escaping the Rosy Dawn was all it would take to step out from the cave. The world seemed so bright that it was nearly blinding, when I was looking out at it from the confines of the Scarlet City. When I met you and saw what even a barbarian state could produce, it felt like the point proven. When Nikolas returned and I saw what the wider world had done for his soul, I knew that I had to leave or nothing would ever change.

And yet, the raven in my shadow warbled, while Selene went back to searching and Scythas sat heavily on an empty bench.

And yet. The further that I’ve ventured and the more that I have seen, the less this world resembles what I know that it should be.

The world, I mused, or the people that inhabit it?

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

I feel as if I never left that cave, he finally admitted. Quietly, every raw word a confession. Lately, I’ve wondered if there was ever a cave at all - whether those shadows I saw were shadows at all, or whether they were simply lies.

Piercing scarlet eyes observed the Hero Scythas lean forward on his bench, covering his face with his hands.

You’re worried that everyone you meet will disappoint you, I said in summation. Even the legends that defined your culture.

I was. A part of me still is. Griffon uncrossed his arms, taking the horn cup from his unburning hand of pankration intent. But now, I’m wondering if the fault lies within my own interpretation.

Go on, I said, though I was confident our idea was the same.

I can’t hear the faintest echo of the Augur’s music in this worthless shack, but maybe that’s my own failing. Even if I could, it’s possible the sound would disappoint me, even if I could. Maybe the nectar will, too. Another echo of a better taste. Maybe all the world is like that.

Griffon looked to me. I met his searching gaze without judgement.

Are we the shadows, Sol?

There was only one way to find out.

As one, we pulled our shadows over our heads and donned our mantels of ravenous hunger. My ragged cloak of midnight black, and his tattered robes of the same color - hanging down around his waist, exposing his bare torso and the blood red tattoos winding across it.

We stepped into the Orphic House together.

I heard the lyre first.

Emerging from the shadows, we beheld a singing house at full capacity. Every bench was lined by men and women of varying creed, wearing cloth and armor from every corner of the modern world and every era to precede it. Thracians, Greeks, Macedonians and Asians and Africans. Torches lit their faces, revealing the creases at the corners of their eyes as they smiled and laughed and sang.

Griffon sighed in slow satisfaction.

“Welcome to the odeon, boys,” a man spoke beside us, carrying a tray of ivory cups and grapes. He offered them to us like an attendant, despite the fact that he was dressed in threads of spun gold and every one of his teeth was an implant of carved alabaster. “Care for a drink?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

“We brought our own,” Griffon explained, and we each held up our horn cups. The attendant dipped his head, the flames behind his eyes flickering mirthfully to match his smile.

“So I see. Then by all means, enjoy the show.”

I didn’t need to see the grin behind the raven’s veil to know it was there.

“I intend to,” Griffon said, and we moved with purpose down the crowded stands.

Down on stage, Orpheus plucked his humble strings.

1.83

The Young Griffon

The Conqueror’s polis was not entirely abandoned.

The husk of a city - what Sol insisted had once been a military colony - was all but rubble now, nearly every structure bearing scars and infirmities. There was not a stone column remaining without a few cracks or missing chunks. Every wall was at least partially collapsed, every door torn down or left hanging morosely in its frame. Decorative carvings had been scraped away. Murals had been scoured off the walls or otherwise painted over. All in all, it was a desecration too complete to be the work of Kronos alone.

However, there was one building that still stood without any signs of wear. Ironically, in this abandoned city of scattered bricks and marble rubble, the only monument left intact was made of wood. A humble odeon - also known as a singing house. A smaller iteration of a Greek theater, with a shingled roof of sun-baked clay added onto the design to facilitate better acoustics.

A pair of Thracians sat at the entrance, one on either side. Scythas pulled ahead with his mare as they came into view, making a beeline towards them. As we drew closer I saw that one was a man and the other a woman.

The man was a typical example of his breed, red-haired and larger than the average unrefined Greek by the full span of a hand. The details of his physique were mostly obscured by his ridiculous Thracian pants and voluminous chiton, but his crossed arms were bare and layered with muscle. Vibrant blue tattoos stood out starkly from the man’s pale skin, patterned like ivy leaves growing up and down his arms.

The woman was a sharp departure from the mothers and wives we had seen tending to the children and men of Thracia’s wandering cities. Her clothes matched the style of the man beside her, as did the tattoos on her arms, and dark makeup shadowed her eyes while also coating her lips. Her brown hair fell freely without braids or cloth to bind it. The only ornament on her head was a crescent band of gold, less than a crown but more than a tiara. As we approached, I saw a pattern of hexagonal shapes pressed into the gold. Like it was made of honeycomb rather than metal.

Scythas stopped his dappled mare a respectful distance from the Thracians and the entry they were guarding. Sol and I shared a doubtful look.

“This… doesn’t seem promising,” Selene said quietly, leaning sideways to look around Sol at the wooden singing house. “I can’t sense anyone besides those two at the door.”

“Neither can I,” Sol confirmed, and I made a noise of my own agreement.

It was surprising enough that I could feel something from the two sitting guard. They were Thracians, that much was plain to see from their features and the clothes they were wearing, but even so I could feel it as their notice brushed over me and their influence parted around mine. The sensation of their vital essence was odd, familiar and yet alien. I was all but certain they were cultivators of some kind, but I couldn’t intuitively grasp their standing the way I could a Greek’s.

“It could be a veil of some kind,” I said, considering them as we drew closer. Thracian gatekeepers in a ruined Macedonian city. “Or it could be that everyone inside is unawoken.”

“Could be that there’s no one there at all,” Selene murmured. I glanced sidelong at the daughter of the Oracle, reaching across the distance with a pankration hand and lightly shoving her shoulder. She blinked, breaking her gloomy focus.

“We don’t need it to be packed full of rowdy barbarians,” I reminded the girl. “So long as there’s wine and a golden cup to pour it in, we’ll have found our way.”

“Scythas knows what he’s doing,” Sol assured her, and though the words were spoken at a solemn volume, I saw Scythas straighten up a fraction in his saddle up ahead.

“Our destination is inside,” the Hero informed us when we joined him, Sol on his left and myself on his right. “All that’s left to do is pay.” I looked down on the woman wearing a half-crown of honeycomb gold. She raised an eyebrow at me, expression disinterested.

“I have no money,” I told her. This close, I could count the combs of her half-crown and see the individual flakes of gold strung through the hem of her chiton - grape leaves, to accompany the black threads woven to look like vines.

I could also see the faint glitter of gold dust in the shadowed makeup around her eyes when she blinked and tilted her head.

“You have a horse.”

The price of doing business in Thracia. It seemed Scythas had been speaking more literally than I’d first thought.

“I’ll work for it,” I offered instead, politely ignoring Sol’s disgusted sigh.

The Thracian woman was seated on the right hand side of the wooden stairs leading up to the singing house’s entrance. Aside from her maroon chiton and garishly patterned pants, she had nothing at hand to protect her from Boreas’ cruel winds or the snow covering the steps. Nothing but a hollow horn cup filled with white liquid, emitting no steam.

Yet her bare arms did not shiver, neither her fingers nor her naked toes were blackened by frost, and as she sipped from her frigid beverage she seemed entirely unbothered by the weather. I waited patiently while she considered my offer.

“No.”

“Don’t be fooled by my ugly cloak,” I said, plucking at the gift I had received from the men of the Korpiloi tribe. Manifesting the limbs of my violent intent, I blessed her briefly with the heat of my cult’s foundational mystery. “A Greek Philosopher is offering you his service in exchange for admittance to this derelict theater. Ask me any question and I’ll answer it truthfully. Assign me any task and I will see it done. You have my word.”

“Griffon,” Scythas snapped. I raised an eyebrow of my own at the gatekeeper. She took another sip from her horn.

“In that case- no.”

“No,” I echoed her, considering the barbarian woman. “But if I gave you this horse, that would be enough?”

The woman eyed my horse critically. Finally, she nodded. “Just barely.”

“So then,” I said mildly, continuing the thought. “What you’re telling me, ultimately, is that everything I am capable of saying and doing is worth less to you than a horse without a saddle.”

To her credit, she did not hesitate.

“Yes.”

I smiled sharply. “Tell me, barbarian, are you familiar with the concept of discourse? Would you like to exchange some?”

“Griffon,” Sol rumbled in low warning. I glanced left and saw the storm in his eyes. He was serious. His pneuma rose to match mine, an unspoken ultimatum - if I started another brawl here, he’d make good on his prior warning to join in on the opposing side. Doubtlessly, Scythas would join him over me. A hopeless fight.

I considered it.

“Enough.” Scythas growled. “Why are you trying to find another way? Acquiring horses we didn’t need and shackling ourselves to their pace, that was for this moment. You didn’t even pay for yours - I did.”

“That’s true,” I agreed.

“Then what’s the issue?”

I laid an open palm against the side of my slender runner’s head. She leaned into it, huffing softly. With my other hand, the one that I had fisted in her mane for lack of reins to hold, I thumbed the glossy black braids that I had decided suited her best.

“I was considering naming her,” I told the Hero. For a moment, he was lost for words.

“There…” Scythas sighed. “There will be other horses, Griffon. Unless you planned on making the rest of this journey over land at her pace, we wouldn’t have been able to take her with us anyway. She’d despise the Eos.”

“Perhaps.” I leaned forward, tapping the pure white mare to get her attention. Her dull yellow eye settled on me. “What say you? If I gave you a name and spared you this bleak fate, would you tolerate an unsteady deck and wide open seas?” I spoke each word carefully, enunciating with such clarity that my boyhood mentors would have wept tears of joy to hear it. I searched her eye for a hint of understanding. Some semblance of a spark, like the expectation in Sorea’s eyes whenever the eagle looked at Sol.

The Thracian mare stared back at me with an animal’s vacant curiosity. I frowned, leaned away, and dismounted. As I slid off her back, I pulled the fingers of my violent intent through the black hair of her mane and undid its braids.

“Fine. Take the beast. While you’re at it, tell me why I’m giving it to you before I change my mind.”

“Neither of us told you to come here, Greek,” the muscled Thracian man on the left edge of the stairs remarked. He raised his own horn of cold white liquid to his lips and drank noisily, eyes shut in languid bliss. He belched when he was done, and once his eyes finally drifted open to regard me, there was a dull enjoyment in them.

“You’ll have to excuse him,” his companion said with flagrant insincerity. “He was raised in a savage culture, you see. He doesn’t know any better.”

“Do you find my manners distasteful?” the man asked me. Upon further inspection, I saw hints of blue ink on his scalp in the gaps where his hair naturally parted. More than just his arms, the Thracian had tattooed his own scalp.

“I find nearly everything about you distasteful,” I told him honestly. He chortled around his next sip.

“What is this place?” Sol asked, remaining on his stallion while Scythas joined me in dismounting and began stripping his mount of her fastenings.

“This is a sanctuary of various faces,” the Thracian man answered him, waving languidly at the destitute odeon behind them. “A place to sing, a place to take shelter from the storm, a place to be lost-”

“-And a place to be found,” his companion added. He tipped his horn cup to her.

“Certainly that,” he agreed. “This here is the first monument built in our humble settlement, and the last one left intact. The Orphic House, should it suit your pleasure.”

“Orphic,” Sol muttered, immediately making the connection to the story I had told him just a couple nights before. I nodded fractionally, confirming it. He turned doubtful eyes on the wooden construction. “Of all the structures torn down, this was the only one to escape the fall unscathed? The oldest of them, built of the least enduring material? It looks-”

“Ramshackle,” I said, pressing my foot down on the first wooden step and listening to it groan. My glowing pankration palms flitted over the southern face of the singing house, illuminating the discolorations and impurities in its wooden panels.

“It’s in the best shape of any building here. However.” Even Scythas couldn’t fully ignore the state of it. “Infirm would be a kind word for it.”

I sneered, disgusted the more of it I saw. This was where we were meant to find our golden cup of sacred wine? It lacked sanctity. It lacked presence. Why bother maintaining a vigil here after the rest of the city fell to ruin if these barbarians weren’t going to maintain it? Where had they found the audacity to refuse my payment and take my horse for admittance to a glorified barn house? Why did it look like we’d arrived here centuries too late?

“Why does it look like it was made of broken wagons?” I demanded, unable to endure in silence.

“Because it was.”

The Thracian woman reached back, towards the ink-black silhouette cast by my rosy palms, and Scythas sucked in a sharp breath as her arm plunged elbow-deep into her own shadow. She watched me with hooded eyes as she rooted through it, the specks of gold dust in her eyeshadow catching the rosy light.

Her gaze held mine and then drifted, slowly and deliberately, down. Settling on my own silhouette.

She blinked, breaking the spell, and pulled a kithara from her shadow. An instrument with seven strings, like a lyre, but larger and with a body better suited to professional play. The lyre’s modern sibling. Unlike its humble brother, it was one that not just any Greek aristocrat could be expected to know how to play.

The mongrel woman laid the sophisticated instrument across her lap with its neck pressed to her shoulder, and she began to strum. The sound that sprung forth was undeniably pleasant.

“A word for the wise, and another to the uninitiated,” the Orphic gate keeper said in a lilting tone. Her fingers danced across the strings.

“This is a holy place, as much as it is a humble one,” the crude man opposite her on the steps spoke. He set his horned cup aside and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, assuming the role of orator to match her kitharode. “A great man lays here at rest. He was buried by an even greater man, a sworn brother that mourned him more than most. And later, much later, an even greater man than that built this humble mausoleum over his tomb as a tribute to his memory.

“The reason the Orphic House stands where all the rest inside these walls have fallen,” the gatekeeper informed Sol, answering his prior question, “is that the sons of Macedon love their king more than they hate themselves. In their grief and in their rage upon returning from the east, they tore this city apart and drove their own wives and children from their homes. That was one thing. They didn’t think twice about it. But tearing down the Orphic House was entirely another. Not even the most inconsolable soldier would have considered it.”

“Why?” I asked, suspecting the answer as I did.

The Thracian tilted his head, back to the destitute singing house built out of broken wagons.

“This place is special, unlike any other building in the city. The king that ordered this colony erected, the man you call the Conqueror - he built this one himself.”