The Young Griffon

Half a year had come and gone since the day I stood alone in the center of the Scarlet Stadium and accepted every laurel crown the Daylight Games could offer me. Standing tall and proud, as unfulfilled as I was triumphant, I had understood something crucial about the nature of my father’s city and its people - of Alikos entire.

They were all slaves. Every single one of them. And so was I.

This city was the chain.

That conscious acknowledgement had spurred my soul beyond its limits, forcing through the bottleneck in my refinement and carrying me forward from the ninth rank of the Civic Realm to the tenth. At the time, it had felt like opening my eyes. In the months that followed those games I had looked upon the Scarlet City, her citizens and her metics, her freedmen and her slaves, and I had seen for myself the manacles that bound their wrists. Not the iron manacles that Sol had worn with his weary resignation, but manacles of cruel scarlet thread.

No matter his standing, every man in the Scarlet City wore those strings of blood around his wrist. And at the other end of each of those scarlet strings was the same clenched fist. My father’s fist.

At some point between the events of Chilon’s tale and my earliest waking memory, Damon Aetos had claimed his island in the sun. The Scarlet City was his, and every man within it was his slave.

In my naivety, I had decided that that was a trait unique to him - that all the world outside of his domain would be glorious and true. And so when my cousin returned home more vibrant than he’d left, I’d taken that as my cosmic confirmation and taken the only opportunity available to me at his wedding - the one and only night of the year that my father would be preoccupied by the fallen sun god’s wonder and I would not. I had escaped, escaped, with Sol at my side, and in that moment I had believed from the bottom of my virtuous heart that freedom was waiting for me just beyond that rosy dawn in the greater mediterranean.

I’d been mistaken. In my euphoria, I had erred. Boarding the Eos and setting her sails for Olympia, I had allowed myself to believe that my father was a uniquely overbearing existence. That the world I’d been born into was still golden-bright, in a distant place that I could travel to.

I was wrong. Olympia and its Raging Heaven Cult taught me that. Thracia’s Orphic mystery drove the point home. Every man in the Scarlet City was a slave to the Tyrant Damon Aetos, but that wasn’t unique. It wasn’t because it was the Scarlet City. It wasn’t because it was Damon Aetos.

Every man was a slave to a Tyrant in their domain. There were no kings and queens of glory left remaining in this world - the distance that separated me from that golden place could not be measured in stades or miles. It could only be measured in years. In centuries and millennia. I had missed it.

I had missed all of it.

This world was iron, now. Its gods were dead and gone, its kings and queens were tyrants. And its heroes? Its burning souls, its champions of glory?

They were little more than sparks. As envious of the world’s greater imposition as they were defiant of it. As likely to covet a Tyrant’s yoke as they were to resent it.

As likely to punch down as they were to punch up.

“Junior, it’s time to go.”

Half a year had come and gone since the Daylight Games, and the wheel kept turning after that. The month of mandatory training that preceded the Olympic Games was almost upon us, and the closer we drew to it the more competitors came. First a trickle, then a stream, and now a rushing flood of Heroic cultivators from all over the known world.

It wasn’t the case that every Heroic cultivator in existence would be competing in the Olympic Games, but it felt almost like it as the days passed. Every day saw the arrival of a fresh face in the Olympic Stadium, a new pair of burning eyes and a passionately blazing heart there to size up the competition. As spring secured its grip on the city of Olympia, that fresh face turned into fresh faces, a handful every day. Then dozens.

As these mighty cultivators sought an empty patch of sand in the Olympic pit to call their own, a place to practice for the Games that would define the rest of their lives in just a few short weeks, it was only natural that their juniors would make room for them. As such, every Hero that arrived at the pit was another Philosopher gently pressed out.

It only made sense, after all - while the stadium was technically open to the Raging Heaven’s favored initiates all the up to the lighting of the Olympic Flame, what junior would be so rude as to deny an actual competitor the space they needed to hone their bodies? Never mind the fact that the Games were a test of martial cultivation, of pure bodily refinement. What did it matter that a Heroic sprinter needed no more room to run his laps than any other man? It was the principle of the thing. A matter of respect.

“Junior!” Chilon hissed, reaching out despite his misgivings and grabbing my arm. Sorea, perched on that same arm while I read his delivered missive, snapped his beak in warning and spread wide his wings. The Obol Orator grimaced but held my arm tight. “It’s been a bad idea for days and I let you talk me into it regardless, but the time for games has passed.”

“The time for games is yet to come,” I told him without looking up from the letter.

Though I couldn’t see his face, I felt his frustration and his fear in the beating of his heart. To my senior’s credit, the Heroic heart sense that Orpheus had awoken in me was the only sense that betrayed Chilon’s true panic. His pneuma did not rise, and his sophic influence was only an insistent current against my own. If not for my time in Thracia, I wouldn’t have had any indication that at this moment Chilon thought he was going to die.

The more Heroic cultivators that came to stake their claim in the Olympic Stadium’s grand sand pit, the more Sophic cultivators gave up their spots in deference to them. Soon the Sophic majority had leveled out into an equal proportion, and then in a cascade of Heroic arrivals and Sophic departures given way entirely to a Heroic majority. The more Philosophers that fled, the greater the scrutiny those that remained were made to suffer through. The apathetic tolerance I’d first observed gave way to expectant glances as the days passed. That expectation soon turned to irritation. The glances turned to glares.

Chilon and I had been the last two Philosophers remaining in the pit for nearly a week now. Chilon hadn’t liked it, but he’d liked the idea of leaving me to my own devices even less. Thankfully, secluded as we were in our humble patch of shadowed sand near the stadium’s western entrance, that Heroic irritation had remained largely passive. It was an enormous stadium, and there was still plenty of room for every competitor in the city despite the way they postured.

But all good things inevitably ended. In this case, it was a Hero who I had met once before that was ending them. A familiar face from a rowdy drinking club, one of the Raging Heaven Cult’s own Young Aristocrats, had just been forced out of his place in the pit. The aggressor was a larger competitor who I could only assume was his senior in refinement. Now the displaced Hero was headed our way, a fire in his eyes and murder in his heart.

“Griffon,” Chilon spoke firmly. “We have to go right now. Trust me in this.”

Even now, as the terror built in the frantic beating of his heart, he restrained himself and scolded me like a mentor scolded an errant student. He was trying to save me without terrifying me. Attempting to guide me out of harm without bringing the harm to my attention, worried that I’d panic and trip headfirst into it if I knew that it was there. Protecting me as my senior from the consequences of my own bravado.

“I’m not leaving,” I told him, reading Sol’s letter intently. On my arm, Sorea shrieked a warning cry into the Obol Orator’s face. He flinched, and a portion of his panic seeped through the cracks in his composure.

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“Listen to me, now! This isn’t our place! We have to leave while we still can, while he’s affording us the time-!”

“Greetings, Philosophers,” the Hero Alazon insulted us, his pleasant voice a stark contrast to the ugly rage inside his heart. “You’ve taken my spot.”

I felt a powerful sense of déjà vu.

“I don’t see your name on it,” I said, the same as I had the morning after Bakkhos’ funeral, in a drinking club owned by the Hero’s own family. At that time, there had been three Heroic cultivators at my back and three more on their way. Now I alone remained, with only a Philosopher of the eight rank to speak on my behalf.

And to the old man’s credit, Chilon did speak.

“Excuse these lowly sophists,” the Obol Orator said, mastering himself at once and masking his fear to all but a Hero’s heart sense. It wasn’t enough, but it was an admirable effort. He gripped my arm and raised it up demonstrably. “This one’s intentions are good, but I fear he’s spent too much time out here in pursuit of refinement - the sun has addled his senses, you see. If it pleases the Hero, I’ll escort him out-”

“It does not please me,” Alazon said flatly. “You may go, sophist. But I have business with this one.”

I was surprised. An offer to take his life and run - it was more grace than I would have expected from the spiteful Young Aristocrat.

I was surprised again when Chilon refused to take it.

“Honored Hero, please - he’s hardly more than a boy. We were all young and foolish at one point, weren’t we? Of course some grow out of their inadequacies sooner than others, but isn’t that why old men like us exist? To guide our juniors down the path that every man once walked alone? Is that not a wise man’s virtue?”

“A withered old man’s virtue, perhaps.” Alazon dismissed him, and I heard the Hero advance another step through the sands. His rage was beating harder against my ribs with every moment that I refused to look up from my letter. “But I am not old like you are old. There is no we. If you claim to be a wise man, you should understand the difference between us.”

“I implore the great Hero, turn your eyes from our differences and towards the traits that we share as sons of Raging Heaven-!”

“One more word!” Alazon snarled, his pneuma rising and lashing out like a snake, the sudden crashing wave of his influence nearly throwing Chilon off his feet. “One more word, you wretched failure, and you’ll wish that immortal storm crown had never spit you back out. One more word and I’ll send you back to your worthless village in a thousand wizened pieces! Begone.”

Chilon didn’t say another word, but neither did he move. He stood between us while terror and shame hammered at the seams of his composure, knowing he was going to die and standing his ground regardless.

“What is the champion’s virtue?” I mused. There was a moment of silence. Distantly, beyond our humble patch of sand, I felt the myriad streams of curious influence shift away from Alazon and Chilon, converging onto me. It was hardly the first time there had been a confrontation in the pit, but it was surely the only time that the argument had taken place between a Hero and a Philosopher.

These Heroic souls had come from all walks of life, from every corner of the free mediterranean, bearing the proof of their standing in each of their burning eyes. No one Hero was the same as any other. Each of them was unique. Each of them was glorious. Each one a slayer of monsters, a liberator of men.

And somehow, here and now, each and every Heroic cultivator paying attention to our little spat was content to let it run its course.

“Speak up, junior,” Alazon demanded, though I knew he’d heard me clear as day.

“What is the champion’s virtue?” I asked him again. Sol’s letter was written as succinctly as could be, but that didn’t make its contents any easier to come to terms with. I read it again. It hardly made a difference. “You’re a champion, aren’t you? You’re here to compete.”

“No. I’m here to win a crown.”

“It’s the crown that matters,” I murmured, reading the letter again. Not the competition. Not the struggle. “Victory alone is a champion’s virtue?”

“How did you make it to the Sophic Realm at all? Idiot colonial, it’s right there in the name. A champion stands above.”

The crown was only worth the effort it took to seize it. I’d learned that lesson in the Daylight Games. How was it that I understood that and not him? How could a lowly citizen know in the fullness of their soul what a legendary hero had yet to grasp?

This world is iron now, Zegreuas had declared in my vision of his madness. I was beginning to see what he’d meant.

In a golden-bright world, in a righteous world, it wouldn’t be this way. That a Tyrant could exist at all was a sign that we had been diminished. That a Hero forced from his place by a greater imposition would choose to turn away and force his will upon his juniors, to punch down instead of up, was evidence that this place was lesser.

I read Sol’s message one final time.

That a Philosopher could lie as easily as he breathed was proof this world was iron.

My heart flickered in my chest, and I burnt the papyrus to ash.

“Let’s exchange discourse,” I decided, looking up from the ashes and rising to my feet.

“Griffon!” Chilon snapped, wheeling around on me in a wide-eyed panic.

Sorea took flight, the virtuous beast tracked by the hungry eyes of more than a few Heroic cultivators. A virtuous beast was valuable in many ways, though consuming it was the least interesting of them all by far. I considered the shadowed sands around me, humming thoughtfully, and then reached into my shadow with formless pankration hands.

Alazon’s eyes flared. “I thought you’d never ask-”

He stopped short, blinking at eight pankration hands as they pulled eight stone blades from my shadow and drove each of them into the sand. Spaced equally apart, they formed an octagon of a size you might find in any mystery cult’s gymnasium. Chilon choked, his eyes flying open wide.

“That’s-!”

The blade that Chilon had cut himself upon during his initiation rites, the blade once buried in the tribulation statue of the Twice-Killed Tyrant Sisyphus, jutted proudly up from the sand along with its stolen sibling swords.

“What is this?” Alazon asked me warily. His eyes flickered left, then right. He was as conscious of our growing audience as I was. And though he didn’t know it yet, he’d made a crucial mistake.

“Every Hero’s spirit is a pittance to the Flame,” I said, stepping into the octagon that separated us. “A Hero’s standing is their key to admittance in the Games, but it’s their body alone that wins them glory. There are ten events a man can win. Tell me, Alazon, which crowns do you covet?”

The Hero glared at me, but he didn’t step through the boundary of my swords. Not yet.

“Long jump and the sprint,” he said at length. I smiled.

“Then I’ll offer you a third. As your senior in-”

“You are not my senior in anything-!”

I struck him with a memory of my lived experience, a drop of Orphic madness, and he leaned back as if I’d slapped him.

“As your senior in pankration, I’ll offer you a chance at a third crown,” I said magnanimously, and pulled off one of the two laurel leaf crowns I kept wrapped around my biceps. I held it up for all the stadium to see, and then I cast it down into the center of the arena I’d outlined with swords. “Step into my domain and face me as you would an opponent in the Games - with martial excellence, with your body’s refinement alone. Match your violence against mine and prove that you deserve this lowly sophist’s place in the pit, or get out of my sight.”

I couldn’t have ignored the black rage in his heart if I’d tried. “You think I’m afraid of your master?” he demanded of me, the flames behind his eyes flaring. “You think the Raven will protect you here? He won’t. And neither will that worthless gossiping bumpkin!” The Hero jabbed a finger at Chilon, hovering just outside the perimeter of swords opposite him. The Obal Orator clenched his fists. “The audacity of it - to set terms, to make demands of me like I’m the outsider. A lion’s time is better spent!”

I could have responded with any number of insults and jeers, could have driven him that final half-step over the edge in front of all of his peers and ruined his name. But that would be a disservice to my senior brother Chilon. Goading him into a rage, forcing the other competitors in the sand pit to step in to preserve the sanctity of their space, that would have been the safest of my options. But it would have been far too long winded. Far too crude.

My response was simple, yet profound. I delivered it to him with the voice of my soul.

“Attend.”

Alazon’s critical mistake had been assuming that I was a coward just like him.

His ego left him only one choice. The Hero Alazon stepped into my octagon.