Chapter .1

Chapter .1

Sol, The Raven from Rome

Cultivation.

The race against mortality went by many names, depending on who was asked and where. The people of Rome knew it as the course of honors. The children of Helen called it the stairway to heaven, and the hollow Macedonians referred to it mournfully as the hitching of their stars. I had learned these terms, among others, from my mentor Aristotle.

Others still I had gleaned from the men of my father's legion. The rank-and-file of the Fifth Legion were native conscripts, harvested like wheat from foreign fields by the General of the West. By his blessing, and by their actions on campaign, these men had transcended their origins and become shining sons of Rome, one and all - but they had never forgotten their roots. Around warm night fires and in the ranks of marching formations, they had shared those origins over the years with me.

The Gaelic tribes were a fractured union on the best of days, and bloody rivals the rest of the time. Yet there was a throughline that connected them all, a Celtic understanding of this life and their place within it that spanned further than even the endless Black Forest - traversing the seas themselves to reach the misty isles of the inscrutable Britons.

The officer ranks of the Fifth Legion were reserved for natural-born Romans, but the First Spear was ever a pragmatic man. Even his black hatred for the western hordes couldn’t blind him to the true value of a soldier in his care. It was one of many reasons why my father had fought to have him in the Fifth. So while he couldn’t promote them in full, the First Spear had elevated the brightest of the Black Forest's people to positions of authority and advisement just beneath his own centurions.

One of those bright sons of Rome had been a druid in his past life, a holy advisor known to his people as an oak-seer. It was this hulking man of wizened faith that had sat me down in the shade of a gnarled willow tree shortly after my father’s death, and showed me how to build a wicker man in his memory. I had seen this druid tear the heads off grown men and beasts with his bare hands in the press of war, but he was as gentle as a summer breeze and patient as a stone while my fingers fumbled and I drifted in my grief.

When the work was done and the wicker man stood tall and proud, we dressed it in the druid’s own armor. I remembered asking him who had given him permission to use the legion’s resources in this way, and I would never forget the ease with which he’d answered that no one had at all. When we lit the wicker man on fire, it was like watching my father die again.

As the wicker man burnt away, the oak-seer who had followed my father into terrible war finally relaxed. It was only in its absence that I noticed the tension had been there at all. Warmed by the fire and protected from the rain by the solemn willow tree, the oak-seer explained to me the divine dividing - the perfecting of a Celtic soul.

To cultivate was to refine. What that meant was a subject of unending debate. Every culture on this earth had their own answer, every man and woman within those nations their own interpretation. Which of them was correct? Was there only one true way forward, a single golden road, or were there many? Could it be that every gate to heaven was made of horn? Or were they one and all of ivory?

I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with ocean air. I breathed in beyond those limits, tracing the excess breath as it spilled from my lungs and filled my pneumatic channels instead. The unnatural pathways had been carved out of my flesh by the starlight marrow of the Rein-Holder and further refined by my time in the Orphic House, taking the shape of a wheel. Beyond the obvious utility of the expanded channels allowing me to more efficiently circulate my pneuma, I hadn’t found any clear use for it in the weeks since.

That had changed the moment that I’d advanced to the third stage of the Sophic Realm. In that moment I had felt a shifting in my flesh, and with the awareness granted by the Titan Prometheus's golden ichor, I had seen the carving out of a new channel. At the time, there had been more pressing concerns.

Now, I filled the wheel to its limits with vital breath and focused on that newest addition. The wheel had three spokes, and as I took that third spoke in my hand-

[I’LL RISE.]

-I forced the wheel to turn.

Flesh and blood that had been burnt away by starlight marrow regrew from full cauterization, creeping like weeds from the western edges of the wheel. At the same time, the eastern edges smoldered and surged forward, burning away new flesh at the same rate that the old flesh was mending. In terms of healing wounds, the pace was unbelievably fast. In terms of a spinning wheel, however, it was an agonizing grind.

I exhaled slowly, steady as my innards burned away and regrew. Stubborn determination allowed me to maintain control. That, and the experience of dozens of prior attempts that had ended in horrible coughing fits. As the wheel turned, consuming and mending, it worked that same wonder on the rest of my body. Gouges given to me by Scythas knitted themselves shut strand-by-strand. Nicks and burns left by Anastasia cycled through a kaleidoscope of ugly inflammation as her poison worked its way through my body and was purged. Time passed. The wheel made my body well.

As for my heart and soul?

My eyes were shut, but I watched on the back of my eyelids as the wicker man burned. It was larger now, so much larger that it dwarfed the willow tree we had sought out for its shade. Rather than a legionnaire's armor, it wore the tents that I had ordered burned the night that the Fifth Legion fell - it wore them like a captain’s cloak. Inside the hollow frame of the burning wicker man, the soldiers of the Fifth Legion screamed and begged for mercy as they were burned alive.The origin of this chapter's debut can be traced to N0v3l--B1n.

The fire seared my face, but I couldn’t have turned away from it if I tried. The oak-seer gripped my head tight, as he had gripped so many heads before he’d torm them from their shoulders, and he whispered in my ear as the legion went up in flames.

"For every rise, there must follow an equal fall. Do not avert your eyes from your works, young tyrant. Observe their flesh now as it cracks. Observe the thrashing of their limbs. These things describe the future - their death throes are the path. You’ve bid your soul to multiply, but ascension is a provocation of natural law. For one of us to rise to greater heights than three thousand men combined, heaven demands three thousand men must fall in kind." The druid's broad and calloused fingers dug into my skull. His voice took on a scathing edge -

"Observe the divine dividing."

And he tore my head off my shoulders. My breath caught, the wheel of channels grinding to a halt within me and scattering the image from my eyelids. I bit down on another coughing fit, smothering it in my chest. I inhaled. Exhaled.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Griffon staring back at me.

Had I possessed the clarity I needed to isolate and cut away that portion of myself a week ago, I would have likely done it. Back when the destruction of accursed Carthage was my one and only aim, an amputation of my heart would have seemed an all too fitting consequence. Now, though?

"Say that your vision was true,” Griffon said, reading me like an open book. "Say that you seek these safer shores and find your legions lost. Why should it matter what they think of you when you pull them from the pit? What could any of them say to you that you haven’t told yourself already? Their judgment doesn’t matter."

"It doesn’t. And it does."

"Worthless Roman. I won’t forgive you if you fall behind."

I smirked faintly, watching broken roads unfold behind my eyelids. "I’ll do my best."

"Will you?" Something about the tone of the raven's voice made me open my eyes, abandoning the wheel before I could truly get it turning. Griffon was still watching me. The accusation was deeper now.

"Say it plainly," I told him, and every eye on the ship turned to watch us in response. Some were furtive about it, others less so. Selene, for her part, poked her head out from the crow's nest and stared openly down at us alongside the red headed pirate child. Only Sorea wasn’t swayed, eyes firmly set on the horizon.

Griffon sighed, releasing his own breathing technique in a rush of steam and leaning forward.

"Since we left Thracia, you’ve ignored this half of who you are and I haven’t said a word because you’re better off without it. But if you must cling to it, then you owe it all your efforts. If you’re determined to keep this unsightly leg attached, I want to see you run with it. It isn’t a question of whether or not you can. I know you’re capable of it. This is a question of will."

The salt of the sea coated my tongue.

"I have no right to lead a legion now."

"Would you let those legions die if they desired it?"

I blinked, utterly thrown by the question. "What?"

Griffon held out a hand, offering it to the open air, and a rosy-fingered hand of his pankration intent appeared opposite of it.

"If you found your lost legions and offered them your hand-" his pankration hand slapped his hand of flesh and blood aside, "-and they refused to take it, would you accept their judgment of you? Even if it killed them?"

I watched the rosy limb sink down, down, slipping through the deck of the Eos like the planks were ocean waves. The men of the Fifth beat their fists against the confines of the wicker man, crying out in misery.

Would you let them burn?

I seized the pankration hand by the tips of its fingers and dragged it back above the deck, tightening my grip when it fought to escape me.

"Of course not," Griffon said, satisfied. "Let them judge you safe and sound upon the shore. Until the day comes that your lost legions are found, you are what remains. You are Rome. The only judgment you have need to fear is your own."

After a heavy beat, Griffon grinned and spread the fingers of his hand. "And mine, of course."

I threw his pankration hand back in his face, and he laughed as it exploded into cinders.

The ship dipped as I rose to my feet, the men at her oars shifting quickly to keep their balance. I swept my eyes over them, searching for something. Some flinched when I laid my focus on them. Others began to sweat, their eyes shivering as they met my stare. Though their reactions varied, the ragged men that Griffin and I had freed from a pirate galley the day we broke our chains looked back at me, one and all, with fear and crushing awe.

I raised my hand and beckoned. "All of you. To me."

Had I invoked the captain's virtue, they couldn’t have crossed the deck any faster.