Chapter 1.126

Chapter 1.126

The Son of Rome

The melee grew more chaotic the further down the mountain we went. The junior estates for the youngest and least of the Raging Heaven’s mystikos came and went, and soon enough I saw that it was more than just my own shaky coalition at war on this mountain. I had hoped otherwise, but deep in my gut I’d known. The initiates of the Howling Wind, Broken Tide, Waning Wax, and Scattered Foam had made it furthest up the mountain, but they were not alone.

I sprinted through the fork that joined our winding path to the primary steps, those that led straight down to the Raging Heaven’s grand entry gates, and I saw a grim cacophony of refined violence spilling all the way down the mountain.

Hundreds upon hundreds of cultivators from all over the free world spat and shouted and raged against one another in countless personal vendettas, acting for all the world as if every single one of them was center stage and all the rest of the mountain their audience. I saw flashing blades forged from iron and bronze, some studded with gems and others inlaid with glimmering veins in the style of the mountain’s tribulation amethyst.

I saw cult techniques spring forth in the dozens with every passing moment, manifested virtues like crashing waves and gale winds that raged without regard for bystanders. I saw men and women washed away and buried beneath their fellow initiates. In other places I saw them crushed and burned and blinded - some all at the same time. The brawl unfurled beneath us like a scroll, and every petty feud I saw was a word written in Raging Heaven’s blood - each one burning sullen as a brand.

For every sword that cut its intended target, there was another that strayed into a nearby brawl. An unnoticed initiate run through by mistake, a sure blow knocked aside by another cultivator’s strike, and on and on it went. In some places, even apparent allies in the same cult attire clashed like raging bulls.

It was a sickening sight, and at the same time it made my palms itch in anticipation. The Roman portion of my soul was at odds with the Greek portion, as was usually the case. I could almost feel it, ridiculous as the thought seemed.

Griffon, for his part, was entirely in his element. His pankration hands were a blur of scarlet light around him as he ran down the mountain path, catching and redirecting and casting aside whatever stray techniques and weapons came his way. The further we descended the worse the fighting got, yet his good mood had only grown.

“I still don’t like it.” His words were damning, but his eyes remained bright. “If everything goes exactly as you want it to, you’ll have only bought them time. The tree has nine roots - one of them is dead and the other eight are rotten. It doesn’t need tending. It needs uprooting.”

“Maybe so. But are we strong enough to uproot it?”

Griffon leapt into the air and spun, dodging a volley of shimmering bronze arrows that thrummed with vicious energy. He struck the archer responsible, a junior philosopher from the Brazen Aegis, with a roundhouse kick to the side of the head. The woman was unconscious before she hit the ground.

“Not yet,” he conceded. “I still don’t like it. It’s naive.”

“It’s a solution. Nothing is perfect.”

“Wrong.” Griffon’s pneuma flared vibrantly, more so than it had been a moment ago and less so than it would be a moment from now. His eyes remained locked on the path ahead of us, but I could tell his mind was back up in the storm crown.

“Nothing down here is perfect,” I amended.

For a long moment Griffon said nothing at all. Then I saw it from the corner of my eye. That ruinous smile.

“Not yet.”

We made it over halfway down the mountain before we caught the eye of someone we couldn’t just run through. Given the state of the mountain and our relative weakness, we’d been fortunate to make it that far at all. After the months we’d spent drawing ire from everyone we could, it was all but inevitable we’d hit such a wall.

He was a stout man in silks the color of rust and dried blood, and his fellow initiates all but flung themselves out of his path as he raced up the mountain to meet us. His stony expression was a foreboding contrast to the screaming fury of his pneuma. He was a captain of the Sophic Realm, and his hoplon shield was covered in blood.

Griffon noticed the approaching cultivator at the same moment I did. He took the man’s measure in an instant and found him wanting, shouting a challenge and leaping down to meet him.

Together, we might have been able to beat him. With Prometheus’ golden blood coursing through me, I felt like I could beat anyone on that mountain. Even if I couldn’t, I had half a mind to try.

Fortunately, it was only half a mind.

Griffon trusted me to watch his flank while he engaged, and so he was entirely unprepared for me to pivot and tackle him off the mountain path before he could engage with the captain from the Infernal Frenzy Cult. Griffon shouted in outrage, our pursuer moved to capitalize on our distraction, and I finished drawing the raven’s mantle over my head.

I stepped into the shadow of a mountain grotto and left the sophic captain to his carnage.

The tempered mantle of the raven did more than just unsettle those who looked upon it. Prior to our trip to Thracia, our black rags had only resembled shadows. Likewise, our ability to step through shadows had been little more than a trick of the light. It was camouflage - exceptionally good camouflage, but in the end only that.

Thracia had changed that. Stepping through the shadows of the Orphic House had been an eye opening experience in more ways than one. Among the many things I’d taken with me from that place, this was one of the most useful.

Griffon and I moved like ghosts through the shadows of Kaukoso Mons. So long as we stayed immersed we were utterly undetectable, even to the other crows we found skulking around in search of easy targets. It forced us to move slower, more methodically, but not agonizingly so.

The shadows of the men and women brawling on the mountain were closed off to us for reasons I couldn’t explain, but in the burning light of dusk we had more than enough mountain crags and grottos to make our way down unbothered.

We were nearly there when Griffon spoke up, scaring the ragged assassin we were creeping by half to death in the process.

“A problem remains.”

I seized the crow and clamped my hand over their mouth before they could scream. I rifled through their rags with my other hand in search of weapons, and it was then I discovered another boon the raven’s tempered mantle had afforded me. Before, Griffon and I had been forced to wait for our captive’s ink-black essence to reveal itself of its own accord.

Now, my hand closed around a bird’s delicate frame and drew it from the assassin’s rags. The man I was holding spasmed, and the ink-black construct of pneuma began to shriek as soon as I pulled it free.

I crushed the crow’s skull with my teeth and tore its head free, chewing methodically. My nose wrinkled. How could Sorea stand this taste?

“I’m listening,” I said, offering Griffon the rest of the crow construct and tossing the assassin out of the shadows. He fell in a heap among a group of senior philosophers that were cutting each other to bloody shreds with nothing more than vicious rhetoric, and after a startled beat the sophists turned away from one another and swarmed the ragged crow.

The physicians scattered around the pavilion cried out, the one that had accused Griffon moments ago the loudest of them all. A moment later, their protests died in their throats.

Harmodius stared down at her legs, baffled. She’d twisted and landed in a crouch with a cultivator’s usual thoughtless grace. She blinked rapidly, tears springing to her eyes.

“There,” Griffon spoke, and his satisfaction was deeper than the sea.

In benevolence, or perhaps in spite, Bakkhos had given each of his Elder Tyrant’s a portion of Kaukoso Mons to rule as they saw fit. Each branch estate was theirs to shape as they saw fit, each one a safe haven wherein their word was heavenly law. It was no surprise, then, that each of their estates had been built in the image of their lost domains.

I’d never seen the Howling Wind Cult’s floating city with my own eyes, nor had I sailed through the Waning Wax Cult’s Alabaster Isles or paid my respects to the city that had made my master who he was. However, I had been to Egypt, and I had been to the ruined cities of the Conqueror in Macedonia, and I had seen both of their marks in the hollow domain of the Scattered Foam Cult’s Elder. I was confident that if and when I did visit the cities that the other Elders had been taken from, I’d see the same resemblance.

When Griffon and I stepped out of the shadows just outside the Burning Dusk’s portion of the mountain, it was like being dropped back into the Scarlet City.

Polyzalus’ sunset domain was a sprawling complex of estates with shingled roofs of baked red clay, laid out in such a way that they caught the light of the falling sun and seemed to catch fire - no, they were on fire. The rooftops burned, the flames giving off no smoke and spreading no further than the clay shingles themselves. Beyond that, I saw the hallmarks of the colony city’s culture carved into stone reliefs, stitched into proud banners and flying flags, and brought to life in the form of lush plant life that I had not seen anywhere else since fleeing Alikos.

“HALT.”

The resemblance was clearest of all in the guards that barred the gates. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and heard the distant howling of wolves as my eyes traced over their bronze armor and the red-feather plumes that jutted up proudly from their helmets. For a moment I was back on that battlefield, shackled and surrounded by the corpses of my men.

It passed.

“Identify yourselves! Now!” One of the men snapped, the one standing in the center of the shield wall barring the gates.

I peeled the raven’s mantle off and cast it back into my shadow. Griffon followed suit beside me.

“My name is Sol, and this is Griffon,” I said, advancing forward towards the shield wall. The soldiers of the Burning Dusk Cult tensed and leveled their spears at me through the gaps. Their formation was cohesive enough, I’d give them that.

“Where did you come from?” The soldier in charge demanded. His narrow eyes flickered between Griffon and I, lingering on Griffon’s pristine cult attire.

“The Rosy Dawn,” I answered. I watched it ripple through their ranks, saw their shock and the confusion.

“Why?” One of them blurted while the lead soldier was still formulating a response.

Griffon laid one hand on the pommel of his stolen blade and laid his other arm across my shoulders. His scarlet eyes glowed, a perfect match to the burning rooftops overhead.

“We’ve come to see the Oracle.”

The collective vitality of the shieldwall reared up like a serpent, outrage and contempt darkening every soldier’s face. The man in charge bared his teeth and slammed his shield back against his breastplate, a challenge that every soldier in the line mimicked. The sound was thunderous, drowning out the distant noise of chaos and fighting.

It was the first time we’d encountered initiates of the Burning Dusk - outside of crows - since arriving in Olympia. Somehow, despite everything I’d learned about the enmity between the two sister cults, their reaction still surprised me. I’d intended to use the Raven’s reputation to sway whatever resistance we encountered, but this... This was a problem.

Just before I made a decision I’d have almost certainly regretted, pneuma like volcanic winds subsumed us all. Griffon and I, and every soldier in the shield wall.

“Is that so?”

Up above our heads, reclining on a burning rooftop as comfortably as he would a feather bed, a Hero sat. I hadn’t felt his arrival or seen him appear, hadn’t noticed him at all until he’d spoken. His burning eyes regarded Griffon and I with amused expectation.

“Give your men a break, captain,” he said, though his eyes never left Griffon and I. “I’ll handle these two.”

The central soldier whipped his head around like he’d been slapped, staring up in disbelief at the Hero. “Butcher, what are you-!?”

The soldier’s blood-orange cloak abruptly caught flame, and he snarled a curse while his fellow soldiers leapt away from him in alarm.

“Off you go,” the Hero drawled, shooing them away. Some of the soldiers took the legendary cultivator’s order for what it was and marched double time back into their complex. The man that had been in charge of the gates only moments ago threw his burning cloak to the ground and glared murderously up at the Hero he’d called Butcher.

“We aren’t your men,” he seethed. “The kyrios will hear of this, I promise you that!”

For the first time since his arrival, the Hero turned his burning gaze away from Griffon and I. He cocked an eyebrow at the soldier.

“Who do you think sent me?”

That was enough to convince the rest of them. Griffon’s arm tightened around my shoulder as they drew back and retreated, his knuckles white around the hilt of his blade. I held my own spear at the ready, but there was something...

The Hero landed adroitly in the center of the gateway, glory rolling off of him in waves. He was taller than both of us, not to the scale of a Tyrant or even Orpheus, but taller than any man had a right to be. He had a sword belted to his hip and a well-worn traveler’s cloak hung comfortably across his broad shoulders. His breastplate and his greaves were pristine, shining brass.

He considered us both, his lips quirking up. Then he took a deliberate step forward, stepping outside of Polyzalus’ sunset domain and bringing us within reach of his blade.

“Let’s speak candidly, boys.”