Chapter 1.127

Chapter 1.127

The Son of Rome

“You’ve done well,” the Hero said. Both Griffon and I stared at the towering cultivator, utterly thrown, and he laughed. “Not what you expected?”

“Not quite,” I said warily.

“We haven’t made many friends here,” Griffon added.

The Hero chuckled, eyes crinkling in fond recollection. “No, you’ve made a beautiful mess of this place. It’s to be expected that the bees won’t be happy when you kick their hive. If you ask me, though, the schemers deserve every gray hair you’ve given them.”

Griffon relaxed ever so slightly, his arm no longer an iron bar around my shoulder. I eyed the jovial Hero.

“May we pass, then?”

“Of course not.”

The Hero waved his hand through the air between us, brushing off Griffon’s poisonous glare. “None of that,” he chided. “Appreciation of good character doesn’t change the world around us, nor our place within it. This is the Burning Dusk Cult or near enough to it, and only members of its faith may enter without an invitation.”

“Some would argue that the Rosy Dawn and Burning Dusk are one face,” I said.

“Some would,” the Hero agreed, placing gentle emphasis on the first word.

Griffon cast his own words mockingly back. “Let’s speak candidly.”

The Roman portion of me grimaced and cursed my idiot brother’s lack of diplomacy. The part of me that was Greek readied itself for a fight. All the while, the Titan Flame’s ichor beat a tattoo against the spokes of the wheel inside my chest, burning hotter and hotter every second.

The Hero inclined his head. “Fair enough. Old ‘Zalus won’t tolerate a single one of Damon Aetos’ ilk inside of his domain, least of all one of his Young Aristocrats.”

Griffon didn’t rock back on his heels, nor turn his face as if he’d been struck, but he might as well have done both. The utter stillness of his expression gave him away clear as daybreak. When his eyes flickered down, it only drove the point home.

Since our flight from the Scarlet City, Griffon and I had been through our fair share of misfortune. We had been battered by cultivators in back alleys and sand pits. We had sailed across the Ionian and then further, up the Aegean and back, in just a few days each way. We had weathered the cruel blizzards of northern Thracia as well as the unnatural storm that hung eternally above Kaukoso Mons. We had been beaten down time and time again by the man known as the Gadfly.

We had lived.

In that time, my attire had changed frequently. It wasn’t a question of aesthetics. Though my roots were patrician, the legions had long since disavowed me of such vanity. No, it was a question of practicality. My Rosy Dawn attire had already been ruined before we stole the Eos, marred by months of slave work. The indigo silks of the Raging Heaven Cult that I’d acquired after my bath were finely made, but they were still ceremonial. Our midnight marauding had all but unmade them by the time Socrates thrashed me.

In the end, the Gadfly had given me his own battered breastplate from his days as a hoplite, and that was the only piece to survive our trip to Thracia untattered. The tunic had nearly made it through, only for my bastard horse to tear it in half during our struggle outside the Orphic house.

Even the grimiest vagrant had to change out their rags eventually. Yet somehow, throughout it all, Griffon had never once given up his Rosy Dawn silks.

He had worn them negligently, shrugged them off his shoulders, and walked around with a bare chest while they hung from his belt, and their designs had been marred by blood stains and tears long before Olympia was a sliver on our horizon. The months that followed had only added on to the damage. They’ve been almost unrecognizable as early as that morning.

But Prometheus had made us well, from the hair on our heads to the tips of our toes. Even our clothes have been mended. For the first time in centuries, the Gadfly’s bronze breastplate glimmered pristinely without a single dent or scratch. And for the first time since our escape, Griffon’s scarlet silks stood out proudly to anyone that cared to recognize them.

Red sun rising, more scarlet thread then there was white. More than just a mystiko’s attire. Griffon's renovated robes marked him as a young pillar.

“My compliments to your tailor,” the Hero said easily, breaking Griffon’s tense silence. “I’ve seen good men give up after far less abuse than what you put those robes through.”

“You have us at a disadvantage,” I put forward, mind racing as I did. Where was the path forward?

“In more ways than one,” the Hero agreed.

“Who are you?” Griffon asked, intent. The Hero tapped the flat edge of the blade that hung without a sheath at his hip. It was an ugly, wicked looking thing. Too broad to be a sword and too long to be a cleaver.

“They call me the Butcher in this city,” the Hero said thoughtfully, and though there wasn’t a hint of a threat in his voice, I felt the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. The Butcher hummed, then shrugged. “But you can call me senior brother.”

Griffon snorted, unwinding his arm from my shoulder and stepping forward. He had to tilt his head back to meet the Hero's eyes, but he still managed to make it look like he was staring down his nose at him.

“If you know enough to recognize me by my station, you should understand this much. A Young Aristocrat has no senior brothers outside the airistois. I’ll call you elder.”

The Hero abruptly grimaced. “Please don’t. I’m not that old.”

“Weathered Hero,” Griffon suggested.

“Even worse.”

“Ancient chain breaker-”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tell me then, senior,” Griffon continued archly, “why can’t your juniors pass?”

“I already told you old ‘Zalus won’t allow it,” the Hero said in bemusement.

“And if we have good reason to be here?” I pressed him, vividly aware of the brawl that continued to rage further up the mountain. A distant roar, but not distant enough. “We have something Polyzalus wants. Something he can’t get for himself. A gift.”

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I can count the number of such gifts on one hand.”

“Nectar to cure his wife,” Griffon said, and the Butcher’s other eyebrow rose.

“That would be one of them.” The Hero tapped the hilt of his blade and cast his eyes skyward. “Though your chances might be better if you threw in a golden apple to sweeten the deal.”

He didn’t believe us. That was fine. We’d expected as much.

“What if we could prove it?” I said, finally stepping onto the golden path forward. “What would your answer be then?”

Or so I thought.

The Butcher shook his head. “Still no.”

“What?” Griffon hissed.

“You could convince me the sky was a hammer and its anvil the earth - it wouldn’t change a thing once you passed through those gates,” he said, tilting his chin at the gateway behind him. “That’s old ‘Zalus’ world. And you’ll never convince him of a thing.”

“We have proof-”

“It doesn’t matter. He’d cast his wife into the sea before he fed her anything from the Rosy Dawn.”

“And if you took it to him?” I asked, though I knew Griffon would never accept such a solution. “If it was your hand that offered the cup?”

“Even then. Your role in this arrangement taints it.”

“Selene told me her father loved her mother,” I challenged him. “She told me he’d do anything to see her made well. Are you calling her a liar?”

The Hero stepped back, leaning against one of the carved columns that marked the boundary between the Burning Dusk faction and the rest of the Raging Heaven Cult. He glanced up at the stone relief that each of the columns together propped up - that of a towering king riding in a chariot, reins in one hand and the sun in the other.

“Tell me,” the Butcher bade us, “what do you know of the First Son to Burn?” Griffon and I shared a look. “No, you’re right, this isn’t a lecture and I’m far from a philosopher. Let’s start smaller. What do you think a Tyrant is?”

There were some questions that existed without definitive answers, whetstones for the mind that mentors used to challenge their pupils. It tested the portion of the mind that lay dormant while a student memorized the truths of the world that weren’t up for debate. On the other hand, there were questions that could only possibly lead to one conclusion - questions that the Pythagorean’s and their like pursued tirelessly.

Somehow, I knew this question was both at once. There were countless ways to define a tyrant, and for all that that was true, I knew the Butcher would only accept one. I could spend my entire life searching for that answer and there was no guarantee that I would find it.

I could only tell him the truth as I saw it. As I had seen it in the darkness of command tents, in the bondage of iron chains, in the grip of mad visions - and in the weeping of this Half-Step City.

What is a Tyrant?

Griffon and I answered a question with an endless number of possible answers at the very same time, and then, impossibly, our answers were exactly the same.

““A prison.””

The Hero snapped his fingers and pointed at us like we’d given away a secret. “That right there. That’s exactly why.”

“You didn’t say we were wrong,” Griffon noted.

“I didn’t.” The Hero sounded pleased, but the heart flames behind his eyes were burning low now. “Because you’re right, of course. The problem is, you don’t know why.”

His heart flames flickered, and a sullen glow began to seep through his blade. Within moments, it looked like it was fresh from the forge and ready to be quenched. He nudged the pommel of his ugly cleaver and the blade swung in its belt loop, tapping lightly against the marble pillar behind him.

A line of fire like a hairline fracture appeared in the marble column, beginning at the point where the cleaver marked it and spreading in whisper-thin lines. It surged down the column and across the mountain trail, encircling us before Griffon or I could act. It spread ravenously, as if the butcher had scattered invisible lines of sawdust at our feet.

Then as quickly as it had begun it was complete. The flames kept burning but spread no further. And as we jerked back and spun in place, I saw that the Hero's display had been more than a cheap intimidation tactic.

The Butcher had painted a man’s silhouette on the mountain in flames, and he had placed us in the center of it.

“Most people your age would say a Tyrant is a ruler,” the Butcher explained patiently, as if nothing had happened. “For most, it’s synonymous with king. An Egyptian might call them pharaohs, and Anatolians might instead label them emperors. No matter where you go, so long as there is a city of men, so shall there be a Tyrant.”

He paused, waiting, and when neither of us said a word his grim approval grew.

“Most Greek men your age would have denied that sentiment just now,” he observed. “We call them the free cities for a reason, don’t we? Surely a Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn knows how the great city-states are governed.”

“The vast majority of cultivators don’t cultivate virtue and never will. Of those that do, the vast majority will cultivate virtues so humble that we don’t even have names for them. The greatest of us are the souls that pursue the cardinal four, but they’re a fraction of a fraction. The only ones fortunate enough to survive the consequences of their hubris.”

My brow furrowed. “What hubris?”

The Butcher laid a hand over his face, obscuring it.

“The hubris to look upon the face of god and decide your features would suit it better.”

This is justice. Remember its face.

The knot loosened.

“To cultivate a virtue, to actually cultivate a virtue, is to challenge every man that came before you in its pursuit. Challenge it, or shape yourself to it. The greater the virtue, the longer the shadow it casts. For those that pursue the cardinals, tribulation is more than a grim possibility. It is a certainty. The closer you tie yourself to them, the more this holds true.

“The two of you wear your virtues like second skins, and you’re still blind to it. Just looking at you is like watching children juggle knives.”

“Like boys playing at war,” I murmured. Words from an old advisor.

The knot unraveled.

A spat between two children could go either way unless one of them had a knife. An adult would thrash a child ten times out of ten, but if that child had a knife they might be able to catch the adult off guard. Wound them, if nothing else. But either way, no matter who their opponent was, a child with a knife was as much a danger to themselves as their enemies.

A year ago, in the harvesting wheat fields beneath the Rosy Dawn, Griffon and I had cautioned his younger cousin against chaining himself to a virtue too soon. We had used ourselves as the examples against it, though we hadn’t said that part out loud. Yet even then, the shackles in our minds had been purely metaphorical.

“You boys lack context and that much is bad enough. But worse than that, you lack perspective, a sense of scale-”

“No.”

The Hero ceased his pacing and raised an eyebrow at Griffon. “No?”

“We may be lacking in every other regard,” I added, “but there is no man on this mountain richer in perspective than us.”

The Butcher frowned. “Have I been talking to myself this whole time?”

“Of course not, senior,” Griffon said. “We heard every word. But you’re still wrong.”

He crossed his arms. “Prove it then. Convince me that you understand the consequences of what follows if this plan of yours runs true.”

“How?” I pressed him. “What will be enough?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Griffon and I shared a look.

Then as one we struck the Butcher with the memory of freedom’s wings.

We were hardly more than fresh Philosophers, and he was a Hero, but in this case the message far outweighed the messenger. The Butcher‘s eyes flew open wide, his mouth falling open as the indescribable fury of the Phoenix and the Titan Prometheus ran wild through his mind’s eye.

And then he started laughing.

The Hero laughed the way only drunkards and the truly deranged could, doubling over with the force of it. It was a hysterical sound, the sort that could turn to violence as quickly as camaraderie.

We were halfway to the nearest shadowed overhang when the Hero clapped his hands and straightened up, smile wide and eyes blazing.

“I was wrong about you two. All these months I thought you were nothing more than victims of your own upbringing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, could it? You’re out of your minds.”

Griffon smiled right back, sharp and genuine. “We scarlet sons are all the same.”

The Butcher chortled, stepping away from the sunset gates and clapping us both on the shoulder. In my mind’s eye, the golden road glowed bright.

“More fool me for doubting. I should have known better - he always gets his way.”

Griffon blinked. “Old ‘Zalus?”

But the Hero had already set his sights above our heads, and in the next instant his influence shot across the mountain in seven grasping currents.

“Show’s over,” he called. “Come on out and take a bow.”

I followed his influence with my own, the same way I had followed the smoke signals of a Tyrant’s wandering eye the night of Bakkhos’ funeral. And just like that night, I found Heroic souls at the end of every line.

“This is the last chance anyone will ever give you, and one more than you deserve,” the Butcher told us, heart flames still burning brightly despite the heavy words. “Leave this city and never come back. Return to your island in the sun and spread to others the wisdom you’ve been given. Improve this world as any mortal man can, in the small ways that matter most.”

Griffon rolled his eyes.

“I refuse,” I said simply. The Butcher chuckled and clapped our shoulders before moving past us.

“In that case, a word of advice.”

Of the seven Heroic cultivators that the Butcher’s influence had grasped, only two of them were known to me. One of those two flickered and vanished, fleeing as soon as the butcher marked it. The other one, along with the five I had never encountered before, converged on us from all across the mountain in seconds.

Six Heroic cultivators appeared in a rough circle around us, one from each of the branch factions on the mountain, sans the burning dusk, and the blind maiden. The only one among their number I recognized, the Hero from the Broken Tide with the shark-tooth smile, looked like an entirely different man than he had the last time I saw him.

He looked furious. And nervous.

They all did.

“You’ve made good use of the tools you’ve been given,” the Butcher spoke to us, ignoring the bristling ring of interlopers “But shadows and smoke aren’t enough to make up for what you lack. A Hero's senses are so much sharper than yours that they don’t even need their pneuma to spy on you. They’ll see you long before you see them.”

“What is this?” One of the Heroes demanded, a man nearly the Butcher’s size from the Waning Wax cult.

“Whatever you’re playing at, Butcher, this isn’t the time,” a Heroine from the Scattered Foam bit out, fingers white as they clutched her sword and shield.

A slew of similar demands followed. The Heroes from my alliance were here to take me to their Tyrants so I could explain myself and be struck down if they saw fit. The Heroes from the Infernal Frenzy and the Brazen Aegis had likely been sent to kill us.

The Raven’s shadows hadn’t fooled them. If the Butcher hadn’t drawn them out, we would have never known they were there.

“Always remember,” the Butcher said, utterly unbothered by the rising volume of their demands and their hostility. “No matter how high you set your sights, you’re still stuck down here in the mud with the rest of us. Until the day that that’s no longer true, there’s only one thing that truly matters.”

The Hero from the Broken Tide shouted a warning and glory like crashing tidal waves exploded from his hands. Tense as they had been, the rest of the Heroes surrounding us were only a fraction of a second slower to levy their own foundational techniques.

They were all too slow.

“Strength,” the Butcher intoned, and swung his cleaver around.

Six Heroic cultivators crumpled to the ground, each of their chests a cauterized ruin. Faster than I could track, the Butcher had caved in each of their chests and obliterated their hearts.

The flames behind their glassy eyes had already guttered out by the time I realized the enormity of what had happened. I didn’t have time to shout. I could only grab Griffon’s arm and brace for the impact.

Gravitas.

The weight of three thousand men cratered the mountain and slammed me to my knees a split second before the last gasp of six Heroic souls struck Griffon and I like a tornado. I clenched my eyes shut and grit my teeth, battered from all sides and every angle. Griffon latched on to me with every single one of his pankration hands, and even still he was nearly flung off the side of the mountain.

When the last of their vitality was spent and my own virtue’s retribution had passed, I forced my head to rise.

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk strode casually past the broken corpses of six of his peers, twirling his ugly cleaver in his hand.

“One last thing,” he said, glancing back at us just short of the entryway. “I owe the young miss a great deal. Look after her, will you?”

Griffon reached out, caught between following him and helping me rise. “What are you-” The next word froze in his throat.

“Wait,” I ground out, forcing myself up onto one knee. The golden road was crumbling. We were so close. “Wait!”

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk had cast his cleaver aside, and from a fold within his traveler’s cloak he’d pulled an expertly crafted blade. One that Griffon and I had seen once before -

From a fold in his cult attire Anargyros Aetos pulled three swords, each of them a work of art that he had long discarded - blades that hadn't lasted long in his hands. "I only have these scraps to offer you now, but once the work is done we'll find you each a weapon worth wearing on your belt."

- through the eyes of Stavros Aetos.

“You,” Griffon breathed, at the same moment I recognized the memory of a man changed by decades and three realms of refinement.

His name was Dymas, one of four slaves that had joined Damon Aetos and his brothers in their journey to rescue the Scarlet Oracle.

“Twenty years I’ve waited. I won’t wait another second.”

Dymas swept the shining blade back and forth, heart flames roaring as his Heroic pneuma rose. With every step he stood just a bit taller. He rolled his shoulders as if he was shrugging off the weight of the world, and his eyes crinkled in pure and honest joy.

“Here I come,” he sang, striding through the gates to the Burning Dusk Cult. “The butcher with my blade.”

Burning Dusk fell above our heads, and Dymas cut Polyzalus’ sunset domain in half.