The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Don’t come back. Not until you’ve found something worth sharing - a wife, companions. Your passion.

Niko’s companions had harbored their fair share of doubts and misgivings leading up to the wedding, his wife included among them. They had readied themselves for a fight, gathered up any material advantage they could get their hands on, steeled their hearts and grit their teeth as the Eos braved the Ionian Sea again for the first time in years. And why not? Even Niko had harbored his concerns - and the Scarlet City had treated him well.

There was just something about sailing into the setting sun, further west than any civilized Greek cared to go, and knowing that Damon Aetos was waiting for you on that distant shore. Mortal or Heroic, the prospect unsettled. But Niko was blessed in more ways than one, and the friends he’d made were true. They followed him in spite of their misgivings, and Iphys acquiesced to his destination wedding in the end.

When all was said and done, the surprise wasn’t that things had ended in disaster. It was how they’d fallen apart.

And because of whom.

*

In some ways, it was easier to take the measure of a man by observing the world in his absence.

*

The days passed agonizingly slow. The Olympic Games were most of half a year away when Niko and Iphys exchanged their marital rings. Now, there were hardly more than three.

Some days it was like he had never left. The sheets on his bed were the same, the gymnasium was just as rowdy as he remembered it, and the baths were somehow still occupied by the same old men no matter what time of day or night it happened to be. Their evening meals tasted just how he remembered them. He could still name almost every slave and mystiko in the estates. He memorized the new arrivals in the first week.

But other days, it was glaringly apparent that the Rosy Dawn that Lio had left was not the same Rosy Dawn that Niko remembered.

“Niko!”

Thaum heaved an exasperated sigh, but he sheathed his borrowed sword obligingly and stepped back from their afternoon discourse. One of the larger members of their group, and by far the most restless, the fourth rank Hero had taken to the blade in an effort to pass the time. It wasn’t his preferred weapon, which made it fair to challenge anyone and everyone that wore the Rosy Dawn’s attire. According to him, anyway.

Niko inclined his head and extended his own blade in mock salute. The burly Hero waved him off. “Go on, then. I’ll see if anyone is up for a round in the gym.”

“Easy,” Niko chided him. “The only people on your level here are us and my aunts and uncles. You’ll scare everyone off if you keep it up.”

“I don’t want to hear that from you,” Thaum said, looking pointedly over Niko‘s shoulder at the boy sprinting their way.

Myron still had bruises.

“Cousin,” Niko greeted the boy as he skidded across the frozen surface of a river that had been flowing freely only a couple hours ago.

“Is now a good time?” the ten year old asked between panting breaths, his hands on his knees. Knowing him, he had sprinted all the way down the eastern mountain range to get there. Blue eyes darted furtively to Thaum’s retreating back.

Niko smiled and ruffled his cousin’s hair. “I always have time for my cute little cousins.” Myron huffed and smacked his hand away.

“I’m not cute,” he denied cutely. He stood up straight and puffed out his chest. At his tallest, the crown of his head could just barely brush the underside of Niko‘s chest. A difference of five or six hands.

“You’re adorable,” Niko said frankly. His cousin scowled. “If your mother wasn’t so fierce, I’d worry for your purity around the cult’s senior sisters. I bet they offer to trade pointers with you day and night.”

“How did you-?” Myron shook his head, dashing the tangent from the air. A seriousness overtook him, entirely out of place on his cherubic face. “Enough. I’m ready for the next lesson.”

Niko sighed and sat down on the surface of the frozen lake. His youngest cousin mirrored him, legs crossed and back straight.

“You couldn’t have possibly mastered it that quick,” he said, though he had learned in the past few months not to doubt the absurd things his cousins told him. “It took me months to form the first one. Don’t tell me you’ve been staying up through the night again.”

“Okay. I won’t tell you.”

“Cheeky little brat. Show me, then.”

Myron nodded sharply and closed his eyes, a portion of his body relaxing while his pneuma rose in a smooth sublimation.

It was a warm afternoon, and the early signs of spring were in the air. Niko had forgone the scarlet silks of the Rosy Dawn’s Young Aristocrat and instead ventured out in the bronze armor and leathers that had become far more familiar to him in his years spent abroad. A scarlet scarf was the least of what he could get away with to mark his status, and so it was all that he wore. Myron, for his part, wore the white silks and intricate scarlet trimming of a senior member of the cult, though they were ragged and rumpled. Clearly past due for a cleaning.

Niko wondered how long it had been since his cousin had taken a bath. For that matter, he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten or spoken to his parents. The last time he had slept.

The ten year old inhaled a slow, deep breath, and held it. And held it. Then he opened his eyes, and without exhaling that first breath, he took in a second one.

An impossible feat. The lungs could only take in so much air at a time, after all. But in this case, that first breath hadn’t stopped at the lungs.

Niko‘s cousin hadn’t known what the hunting bird’s breath was only a few short weeks ago. And already he had formed a pneumatic chamber within his body.

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“How long can you hold it for?” he asked, leaning forward.

“As long as I want.”

“You don’t have to exaggerate, cousin,” he told the boy, rapping his knuckles against his forehead. “It’s impressive enough that you managed it at all. Being able to speak while you maintain it is the next step and you’ve already conquered that too. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Just be honest with me.”

“I am being honest,” Myron insisted.

“Is that so?” Well, he supposed he hadn’t been much better at that age. Young and eager to please, even more eager to prove himself. It wouldn’t hurt to humor him. “Enlighten this lowly sophist, then. Why didn’t you maintain it on your way here?”

The hunting bird’s breath was a manipulation of pneuma in its most primal, basic state; it was a breathing technique that allowed a cultivator to store their breath‘s vital essence in a chamber within their body like an eagle. By hollowing out portions of their body, they could use that extra space to store an extra breath, or two, or three, and so on.

Each breath was fuel for an application of virtue. Each breath was vitality in its purest form. If a cultivator with no pneumatic chambers could cast a lance of fire and light from their palm with the vitality of a single breath, then a cultivator with eight chambers could cast nine lances of fire and light in the same brief moment - one from the lungs as the first cultivator had, and one from every pneumatic chamber simultaneously.

The hunting bird’s breath was a breathing technique that had been in the Aetos family for as long as they’d had their name. Every scarlet son to bear the eagle’s name had learned it from their father, who had learned it from his father, who in turn had learned it from his father, all in an unbroken chain spanning back to the first and oldest ancestor.

Except. Somehow, where Niko had been given this ancestral birthright, his cousins had been denied it. Somehow, Myron had never heard of the hunting bird’s breath before Niko had mentioned it in passing weeks ago. Despite the fact that Myron‘s father, Niko’s Uncle Stavros, had been the one to hand it down to him.

It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t.

“It isn’t enough to maintain the chamber while at rest,” he explained for his cousin’s benefit, because although it was a fundamental aspect of the breathing technique, the boy apparently had no one but Niko willing to inform him of it. “You have to be able to control it under duress. The same way you learned to control your breathing in the octagon, or on a marathon run - only now you have to learn how to do it twice. Like you have another set of lungs. When you sleep, when you run, when you speak. If you don’t maintain it, it will collapse. And the moment when you’ll need it, without fail, will be the moment that it’s the hardest to maintain it - and if you lose your grip in a fight, you’ll be fortunate if you live to regret it.”

The hunting bird’s breath was one of the most versatile pneumatic techniques in the world. It was also one of the most difficult to maintain. Years ago, Uncle Stavros had informed him in a voice of fondly remembered suffering that it had taken him almost a year to fully internalize his first pneumatic chamber. It had taken Niko months to fully master his first, and every step along the way had been an infuriating struggle.

So why did his littlest cousin look so smug?

“I know all that already.” Myron exhaled, his pneuma flowing out in a wave as his lungs emptied. He exhaled a second time, draining his pneumatic chamber as well.

“That’s why I didn’t come looking for you until I could maintain two.”

And he exhaled a third time without inhaling, pneuma pouring out of a second internal chamber.

Niko stared.

“I wanted to make sure I had the trick of it, so I went to the gymnasium first,” his youngest cousin explained, pride overtaking Myron’s usual somber seriousness as he flexed a bicep and smacked it. “I kept one chamber filled in reserve, and waited until the end of my last fight to drain the other one.”

It was a warm spring day and yet they were sitting on the surface of a frozen river. Somehow, that was only the second most absurd thing about the conversation.

“Myron,” Niko said faintly, raising one hand and cradling his head in the other. “You promise me you’ve never used this technique before?”

The boy tilted his head, confused. “Why would I lie?”

Right.

Two chambers in less than a month. Two chambers hollowed out of his body by his own intent. Two channels carved through his bones to connect the chambers to his lungs. The pain he had to have endured, pain that his father had spread out over the course of a year - pain that Niko himself had diluted over the course of months and still remembered the bite of. He had condensed that pain into scant weeks, and he had done it twice.

Five years ago, his youngest cousin hadn’t even awoken to his place in the world. He wasn’t even a cultivator. Now here he was. At the eighth rank of the Civic realm, and growing faster than a weed.

“How many times did you lose your grip on it in the gymnasium?” he asked, because no matter how miraculous the boy was, no one was perfect.

“Maybe a dozen,” Myron answered readily. “The first time was bad. I had to skip dinner because I couldn’t stop coughing blood and I knew mom would have my head if she saw it. The second time was worse, but the rest after that were only partial slips.”

“Twice,” Niko echoed. In the end, he couldn’t even be mad. It was his fault for not keeping a closer eye on his cousin. Still. “Why didn’t you come to me after the first slip? Why didn’t you come to me after the second?”

Myron looked utterly confused.

“Why would I? I knew what I had to do.”

He was too young to be this way.

“You hurt yourself,” Niko pointed out. “At the very least, you could have told me that. We could have gone over the technique again. I could have helped you. If I had known you were already that far along, I would have told you to slow down. This process is easier if you give your body time to adjust to it.”

“Why would I want it to be easy?” Myron asked.

Ah.

“Right or wrong, fast or slow, easy or difficult.” The boy ticked off a finger for each category. “If I can do it right, and I can do it fast, why should anything else matter?”

“You carved away pieces of your body to make those chambers,” Niko said quietly, as if the boy didn’t already know. He laid a hand on his cousin’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Wasn’t it painful?”

“It was.” Matter of fact, like he was observing the weather.

“Cultivation doesn’t have to be painful, cousin,” Niko informed him kindly. Only ten years old. Not a hint of stubble on his chin. He was too young to be treating his body like a practice blade. “We temper our bodies, yes, but gradually.

“A scarlet son has to be able to withstand incredible heat to call upon our foundational virtue - as I am now, I can stand in the center of a bonfire and not shed a drop of sweat. But I reached that level of resistance over time. I didn’t go plunging into an open flame on my very first day.”

“Lio did.”

It had been five years since Niko left the Scarlet City. In those five years, Lio Aetos had changed. It was only in his absence that Niko was beginning to understand just how severely. In the marks that he had left behind.

“So what’s next?” Myron pressed.

Lio had changed. And he had changed their cousins just the same.