Chapter 1.22

Chapter 1.22

The Young Griffon

It had to be said. For all of my accolades and for all of my majesty, for all that I was the only man that could ever be me, I was not perfect. I had my failings. And even more egregious than that, I was not all-knowing. In some respects, I was not even particularly well-informed.

My father had always done things in his own time, and the Scarlet City had regulated its pace to match his. For all that I was myself, I was no different in that regard. I cultivated the virtue that he forced upon me, I excelled in the tasks that he set before me, and I learned the lessons that he saw fit to teach me. And only those lessons.

I sought out what I could, whenever I could, of course. But if Damon Aetos didn’t want you to know something, there wasn’t a single soul in Alikos who would dare to speak of it. If there was something he didn’t want you to have, all the gold in Egypt couldn’t convince an Alikoan to sell it to you.

I’d always known that my father was keeping things from me. But I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of it until I’d stepped foot into the sanctuary city.

The Crows were each of the Sophic Realm, which meant that whichever faction sent them hadn’t been pointed our way by our new friends. Otherwise, they would have sent Heroes. In the kyrios’ absence, the Raging Heaven had abandoned all but the most surface level pretenses of unity. The various factions of the free Mediterranean had only just begun to pick each other apart trying to fill the chasm left behind, and division was the name of the game.

Sol and I had implicated ourselves by associating with not one, but six Heroic cultivators in full view of various indigo initiates. This had been inevitable.

Tirelessly, the Crow on the left promised in the voice of his soul.

Forever at hand, the Crow on the right declared with unwavering resolve.

I saw the confusion in Sol’s eyes, soon overtaken by the storm. Gravitas rocked the temple, an inaudible boom that made my teeth vibrate and pounded the Crow on the right back into the olive oil pool. Sol lunged forward to trade blows with the Crow on the left, but the cultivator in black deftly avoided him, ducking and pivoting on one foot and laying a vicious kick into his right shin.

It didn’t sweep Sol’s legs out from under him like the Crow had intended, but the Roman grunted and staggered sideways, pointing a damning finger at the scavenger. Torchlight shadow flickered around him and he blurred left, faster than any Sophic cultivator could possibly move.

He avoided the invocation of Sol’s virtue and caught my clenched fist with his gut. I savored the sweet sound of a man choking on air, hammering into him from every angle with pankration hands wreathed in the rosy light of dawn.

[The dawn breaks.]

Without pause, spoke the Crow, slamming his forehead into mine. Starlight exploded in my eyes and my ears rang, the force of the blow unlike anything I had experienced from a Philosopher before. I bared my teeth in a grin and caught his hands as they lashed up.

A thin line of blood trickled down from the point where his hooded forehead met mine, as the sounds of splashing and savage struggle sounded from the olive oil pool that served as the foundation for the chryselephantine throne. The Crow had no heart flames to illuminate his eyes behind his hood, but I stared deeply into them anyway.

“So this is a man of principle,” I mused, gripping his hood and the tattered edges of his midnight robes with the hands of my intent, ripping and tearing. His pneuma flared.

And he spoke. “Sacrilege,” the Crow intoned, “to fight in the temple of the Father.” And just as before, when those young Philosophers had stated their facts, the strength of his soul re-doubled.

I abandoned the effort of unmasking him as the pressure on our joined hands became unbearable. Pankration hands chopped viciously down on his forearms, forcing him to release me. I leapt back across the tiles.

Three boys, and now this. Not a coincidence - this was something fundamental. Something I should know.

“Starting a fight is far worse than ending it,” I replied, putting the weight of my pneuma behind it. I felt a hint of something, some weightlessness, but I was only imitating what I’d observed as an outsider. I concentrated, while Sol jumped straight up to the ceiling in a spray of olive oil, the Crow on the right in close pursuit.

My opponent turned to flickering shadows again, but he’d already shown me the trick of it the first time. He braced himself first, taking the stance that he would emerge from the technique in. Chambering a right hook from fifty feet away.

I leaned right, dodging it by a hair, and drove a knee up between his legs. As I did it, I condemned him.

“Ambushing your cult’s own honored guests,” I denounced him, striking him twice in the kidney and five times across the face. “On your city’s own holy ground!” The Crow lurched back, shadows flickering as he attempted to escape me. I grabbed him with flaming hands and reeled him back in. “Among heaven and earth, you alone are the dishonored one!”

And I felt it. A power that stirred above my eyes, pulsing through my skull and coursing down, down, ripping through me like an entire jug of kykeon and filling me with vital strength.

The Crow stomped my bare foot and lowered his shoulder into my chest, charging. Lightning threads of pain shot through my foot, and my cultivation faltered as he knocked the wind out of me. He was my superior in cultivation, but that had been the case before with the children. But this cultivator was a grown man - his body had weathered years of intense conditioning. The strength of his body matched that of his soul.

And then, the strength of his reason superseded mine as he lifted my feet from the floor and snarled.

“Fool. I am no one.”

The inexplicable head rush left me as quickly as it had come, an ice bath that shocked the senses and stole the strength from my limbs. It almost killed me as the Crow took us to the ground, producing a hideous rusted dagger from a fold in his robes and stabbing it at my side. But even while my mind wavered, my intent remained true. Pankration hands caught the blade and knocked it from his hand, even as its rusted edge cut into my soul.

I spat blood onto his black veil and swung my legs up, hooking them around his chest and twisting at the waist while we fell to the tiles. The assassin’s blade clattered to the hallowed marble floor, the sound of it all wrong as it skittered and spun across the tiles. The Crow lurched for it, kicking viciously at me, but it was too late. I had him.

The Crow on the right flared his influence, crying out in that soundless voice, and Sol responded in kind with a tidal wave of gravity that caught everyone within the temple. Myself included. My stomach flipped and my heart flew up into my throat as the entire world shifted onto a different axis, and I flew sideways as if I was falling out of the sky. Somewhere up above, Sorea shrieked and the Crow cried out in his real voice.

“My father wanted the best for me,” Sol said with utter conviction.

“So did mine.”

Sol grimaced, shaking olive oil from his hair and looking at the corpse at our feet. “I still don’t like this. I’d rather leave Olympia, go elsewhere.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said, kneeling beside the dead Crow and laying my hands across his body, all twenty-two of them. “Our hands are bloodied now. Are you really fine with leaving things as they are? Leaving the Raging Heaven to consume itself, and allowing our friends to suffer?”

His right hand clenched into a fist, and I knew I had won. “Don’t act like you’re doing this for them. You came here looking for a thrill and you’ve found it. It’s for you, not for them.”

“Wrong,” I said. “It’s both.” I closed my eyes and said a short, silent prayer for the departed man. Then I started stripping him. “Tell me, Sol. Did you find your mentor?”

He shook his head.

“Did you find any leads?” I asked, considering the face of the dead man as the hood pulled free. I didn’t know him. Sol remained silent, which was answer enough. “Let me guess. You confided in Anastasia and she recognized his name. But she didn’t give you anything concrete.”

He grunted.

“You know what sort of existence a Heroic cultivator is, Sol. You’ve heard the tales. If your war stories are more than just dust and wind, then you’ve even seen it for yourself.”

“Get to the point.”

I scoffed, but obliged him. “You know as well as I do that a Hero’s full strength can’t be contained by a city, even if that city is Olympia. It doesn’t fit down alleyways and corridors. It doesn’t thrive in friendly spars and controlled competitions. My cousin Nikolas had plans to compete in the Olympic Games this year, did you know that? His companions, too. Yet they didn’t wear indigo when they came back home, and he never once spoke of the Raging Heaven when he was telling his stories. Why do you think that is?”

“Because he never joined,” Sol said, frowning thoughtfully.

“Exactly.” I unwrapped the black robes from the dead Philosopher and stood, moving over to the olive oil pool and dunking them in, scouring the blood from the cloth with pankration hands. “Almost all of the athletes that compete in the Games do so as outsiders. The mystery cults can not possibly hope to provide for a Hero seeking advancement. It simply isn’t possible.”

“Even with Tyrants there to mentor them?” Sol asked.

“Cultivators are greedy existences, you know this,” I said, shrugging. “There’s only one type of man that a Tyrant will mentor.”

His heir.

Something slid into Sol’s bearing, some nameless steel, and he crossed over to the Crow skewered on the sentinel’s trident. I didn’t see what happened, focusing on my scrubbing, but I felt the pulse of his will and heard the crunch of a man’s skull caving in. My pankration hands cupped the torches protectively as the Philosopher’s last gasp ripped through the temple. There was a pause and then a brief shuffling of cloth, and Sol appeared at my side, dunking his own set of black rags into the olive oil.

“A Hero can’t advance in a cage,” he said quietly, his eyes distant while he worked. Reliving a thousand different memories. “So why are they here?”

“That’s the question,” I confirmed, pulling my new robes from the pool and cracking them like a whip, spraying spirit oil across the Father’s feet. “A Hero can’t be anything less than a significant existence. What could have led them here? What could possibly be worth their time within these walls?”

What could they be running from?

We worked in silence for a few moments, Sol scrubbing while I dried my robes with smoldering palms.

Belatedly, I added, “Also, I want to see the Oracles.”

Sol looked at me incredulously. “Oracles? One wasn’t enough?”

“Who do you think I am?”

The Roman shook his head in disgust and pulled his own robes from the pool, passing them to me when I offered a flaming hand. “How do you plan to blend in? We don’t know who these two answered to. We don’t have any idea how they all communicate with one another. We’ll be rooted out within a day.”

“Use that head of yours, Legate.” I waved a hand at the virtuous beast perched on a high arch, observing us with curiosity. “They’re called Crows for a reason.”

Sol’s eyes narrowed. “Sorea. To me.” The eagle let fly an obliging cry and swept down from the arches, landing gently on the Roman’s outstretched arm. Mongrel bird. The cuts it had given me still stung.

The Roman brandished his open palm and said firmly, “Spit it out.”

Sorea cocked its head, and then its body heaved. The great messenger eagle vomited a pile of ink-black bones into Sol’s hand. Enough for two small birds.

My nose wrinkled. “Well. That’s unfortunate.”