Chapter 1.11

Chapter 1.11

The Young Griffon

Sol and Scythas vanished down an alleyway in pursuit of a kidnapping. A beat passed.

“You’re not going after them?” The cultivator with the bow asked me. He was less cautious now, tension easing out of his posture in Sol’s absence. I glanced at the Heroine and the cultivator in the crocodile skin, and saw them relaxing as well. My nose wrinkled in irritation. I’d done all the work, yet in their eyes I was just another competitor. Meanwhile, Sol was my perceptive and dangerous mentor.

Twice the renown for half the effort. Worthless Roman.

“Why should I?” I asked, miraculously not spitting blood in my annoyance. “I may be a western savage, but even I know that it’s rude to leave a conversation unfinished.”

“This conversation never should have started in the first place,” the Heroine declared flatly. The desert heat in her eyes was only embers now. The tribulation, Sol’s nebulous comment, and the apparent kidnapping of another cultivator had thoroughly doused her competitive spirit, it seemed. A shame.

“How cruel,” I said. I tilted my head, absently rubbing the cut she’d given me on the cheek. “You know, I still haven’t gotten your name. You started a fight before I could properly introduce myself.”

“I started-?” A muscle in her scarred jaw throbbed, but the larger cultivator placed a hand on her shoulder and she sighed, relenting.

“Elissa.”

“Griffon,” I replied in turn. “Well met.”

Elissa spat at my feet.

“And you, friends?” I asked the other two, ignoring her.

“Kyno,” said the man in the crocodile skin.

“Eleftherios,” said the archer with the gold-strung bow. “Most call me Lefteris.” That was fortunate, because I would have shortened it anyway.

I struck out with three hands of pankration intent, and to their credit all three of the heroic cultivators surrounding me reacted instantly. Heroic pneuma rose and heart flames burned as three warriors, each individually capable of wiping me from the earth, prepared to defend themselves from my attack.

Each of my pankration hands slapped against their own and gripped tight, giving them a firm shake.

“Friendship seals our fates,” I said brightly, savoring their reactions. “So tell me, friends, what sort of games are at play here? What vile political maneuvering does the Cult of Raging Heaven get up to behind closed doors?” Or in the middle of crowded pavilions, as it were.

“Nothing beyond the usual,” Kyno said, when it seemed the other two would be too uncomfortable to speak. “The strong wish to be stronger, and the weak are caught up in their schemes.”

“It was inevitable that there would be a... question of succession,” Lefteris said. “The cults of greater mystery are institutions that shape entire generations. The opportunity to lead one and decide what that future will look like? That sort of renown is something cultivators work countless natural lifetimes to achieve.”

“Something like this could never be peaceful,” Elissa said, eyes shifting minutely as she surveyed the crowd. Looking for more thieves in the night.

“I don’t know about never,” I mused. “The Rosy Dawn’s transition of power was fairly simple, I’m told.”

The three Heroic cultivators looked at me as if I’d just said something incredibly dim.

“The Rosy Dawn is the Rosy Dawn,” said Lefteris.

“This is vicious,” I said appreciatively. “They’re not even bothering to hide it.”

“Why would they?” Lefteris’s lips twisted, working over a bitter taste in his mouth. “They’re all doing the same thing. And they know none of the others will dare to interrupt the funeral rites. They’d be crippling themselves.”

So it was the elders conducting the funeral. I’d suspected it already, but having it confirmed was nice as well. A Tyrant seen off by Tyrants. A jealous affair, to be sure. I started walking towards the thinning miasma in the center of the agora.

Elissa caught me by the arm. Her hand gripped tightly around the laurel leaf crown I wore on my bicep, my own champion’s token from the farce my father had put on for me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked in a quiet, deadly tone.

“Introducing myself to the wise men of the cult.” What else?

“Not now,” Kyno said. I cocked an eyebrow, but he only shook his head once, with solemn finality. “Interrupting a man’s funeral is cause for retribution. Interrupting a Tyrant’s...”

“If the heavens opened up for a second time tonight and struck you down where you stood, it would be a mercy,” Elissa promised me. How sweet. She was concerned about my health. As if sensing the thought in my head, she scoffed and shoved me away.

I smiled wryly, shrugging with twenty-two arms. “I’ll defer to my seniors.” I’d still do it if the opportunity presented itself, of course. I had nothing to fear from the heavens. If I was struck by tribulation lightning for my hubris, I would simply not die. “Are we to mourn while our fellow sophists are snatched out from under us, then? I have to admit, we handle the passing of friends differently in the Scarlet City.”

“The elders are the elders,” Kyno echoed Scythas’ sentiment from before. “The actions of others can have no impact on our duty tonight. No matter their standing.”

“A great man died,” Lefteris agreed, as if remembering. “The greatest I’ve ever known. To do anything less than mourn for the length of his eulogy would be to insult his epic.”

“You respected him quite a bit,” I observed.

“We respect him still,” Kyno firmly corrected me.

“Of course we do,” Elissa said, in that way of hers. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “He was one of us. One of the best of us. A breaker of chains.”

“Leader of men,” Lefteris added.

“Slayer of monsters,” Kyno murmured.

“Olympic Champion,” I realized. They each nodded.

“Epics like his can’t be told in a single story,” Lefteris said somberly. “Among heaven and earth, it’s common sense that men reign supreme over beasts. It’s even more obvious that cultivators reign supreme over lesser men. But the kyrios. The kyrios stood above us all. His very existence laid siege to the heights of Olympus Mons.”

I hummed. “But he failed.”

They didn’t react as I expected them to. There was no outrage, no You dare!?’s or You’re tempting the Fates!’, no blood spat. The flames in their eyes only dimmed, and their divinely sculpted bodies slumped every so slightly.

“He failed,” Kyno agreed.

Elissa looked bleakly up. “So what hope do we have?”

In the aftermath of a great man’s failure, while our fellow sophist’s were pilfered in the night by the grasping hands of greedy old Tyrants, we considered the legacy of the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult. A great man, who, in the end, had been only that.

A man.