Selene

Her father wasn’t a monster.

He wasn’t a good man either, and oh, that had stung the first time she admitted it. But Selene wasn’t naïve. She had seen too much of him reflected in the hearts of those that sought her counsel to remain ignorant of his nature. Some said it was impossible for a cultivator to enter the fourth realm without being tainted by its trappings, and eventually Selene had been forced to acknowledge that her father was no exception to that rule.

That wasn’t all there was to him, though. The man known to some as the First Son to Burn, the kyrios to others, and Old ‘Zalus to others still, was first and foremost her father. He was all of his titles, and he was none of them in their entirety. He had done monstrous things, some she knew of and almost certainly others that she didn’t, but he wasn’t a monster.

The man that had raised her, the portion of Polyzalus that was her father, was someone Selene wouldn’t trade for anyone else. That side of him loved like no monster could ever love, more than any man without a beating heart should have been capable of loving.

“Heartless? Is that what they told you? How could I be heartless when I have you?”

Selene’s father loved her desperately, and no matter what the other oracles or the late kyrios himself had to say on the subject, she knew he loved her mother just as much. In some ways even more.

The daughter of an oracle was destined to live a lavish life. The daughter of a Tyrant was just the same. Growing up, Selene had never wanted for anything that could be wrapped up in a bundle and dropped in her lap. The only things she had ever truly wanted for were those her father could not give her - things that only the kyrios had the power to provide. Freedom. Companions. Her mother. However, while her father couldn’t give her mother back, he could share his memories of her.

Selene knew her father loved her mother more than anything else on this earth, because his memories of his wife were the only gift he refused to give her freely.

Only on her birthday would her father share some of his shining recollections, because sharing made them less - though he never told her how. Some memories he’d never shared at all, no matter how she pestered him, such was his love for them both. It was only because she was his daughter that he gave her any of those moments at all.

Selene loved her father, and she loved the glimpses of her mother she had seen through his eyes as well.

She knew he wasn’t a good man, but in the deepest reaches of her heart she believed that he could be. If only he could be free of this mountain. If only he could see her mother smile again. He was a man in terrible need of an oracle’s counsel, a true oracle’s counsel, and there was finally a path forward for him to receive it.

So when she came rushing into his domain in search of a raging lion and was instead swept up into a worried father’s crushing embrace, she returned it. When her father confined her to his domain and forbade her from any external communication, Selene fought only until it became clear he wouldn’t budge. And though it chafed every day that followed, she resigned herself to doing what she could for those within the sunset domain.

Because Selene trusted him. And because she knew the cure was on its way. With or without her, Sol and Griffon would see it done. The nectar would come.

Days passed. Weeks. All the while she offered up her sacrifices and prayers to the Fates and Muses above. She never lost hope. She never strayed in her purpose. And in time, her patience was rewarded.

The Fates answered.

—-

The first strike split her father’s domain in two.

It happened instantly. Far faster than she could track, let alone react to. As if a giant had driven into the mountain with an ax, the small city of estates was split down the middle like a log.

The sound of it was indescribable, like an earthquake and a rock slide and the shattering of a thousand bones all compressed into a single moment. It happened so quickly that Selene could only observe the aftermath, her vision swimming as she picked herself up from her temple’s marble floor.

A new scar marked Kaukoso Mons. From the base of the mountain all the way up to the sovereign estate her father called his own, a trench had been carved out of the mountain. It was so deep that an elephant could have fallen in and vanished entirely from view. The impossible result of an impossible attack.

Selene was so dazed by the shockwave, so distracted by the torrential rain of falling rubble and the screaming of her fellow mystikos, that she almost didn’t notice the sudden tidal wave of violent struggle flowing in from the rest of the mountain.

She didn’t have Scythas’ ears, but Selene was still a Heroine. The moment the enemy struck and broke her fathers veil against the outside world, Selene heard everything that he had been keeping from her. The Raging Heaven Cult was at war.

Selene didn’t have time to process any of it. In the time it took to raise her head from the floor, her father had answered the unspoken challenge to his authority.

“You dare!?”

The First Son to Burn appeared as a wrathful silhouette against the setting sun, his voice thundering reprimand that made her ears ring and her teeth vibrate. The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk struck out with a lashing hand and gripped the empty air. Cords of writhing flame appeared in his fist, like they’d always been there, and the flames that burned on every rooftop in the sunset city rose up to answer his call. They spiraled one and all up into his clenched fist, like the reins of a horse.

“You dare attack what is mine - my people, in my city?”

The very world around her warped, the distant city of Olympia and the storm crown overhead burning away like leaves cast to the earth. In their place emerged a city Selene had only heard stories of. A city of scarlet wonder.

The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk took the reins of his domain in hand, bolstering every aspect of himself at the expense of every aspect of those within its borders, and the intruder was no exception-

No. That wasn’t right. Selene blinked the stars from her vision and stared up in bewilderment at the burning lights above her head.

“Your city?”

The first attack had split her father’s domain down its center. Somehow, impossibly, the flames burning on the roofs of the estates east of the chasm weren’t rising up to the Tyrant’s fist.

“Even a Tyrant’s greed has limits,” a sonorous voice rang forth from the base of the mountain. Selene remembered it. “Only half of Alikos belongs to Burning Dusk. The setting sun has no place within the eastern sky.”

The silhouette of Polyzalus cracked his reins and pulled a thousand screaming stallions from the flames west of the chasm. As he did, his other hand reached out to the setting sun and pulled from it a kopis sword.

“Turn over every stone on every street, tear from the roofs their shingles!” the Tyrant intoned furiously, and the city had no choice but to tear itself apart. In this place, his word was more than heavenly law. This world was his word. “You won’t find a single rosy finger! Show me a rising son that dares oppose my rule - do it, and I’ll show you half a corpse!”

And yet. somehow, the flames east of the chasm refused to come when he called them. Somehow, they were changing before her eyes. Shifting colors. Becoming…

“As you wish.”

Rosy.

[The dawn breaks]

Several things happened at once.

Like shattering glass, the eastern half of her father‘s world broke apart and scattered, revealing the Raging Heaven Cult and distant Olympia once more. Every member of the Burning Dusk on that side of the fault line lurched up out of the rubble and the broken streets like they had been burned and fled blindly in whichever direction was least obstructed. On the western side of the city, the one within her father’s control, every man, woman, and child arched up until it looked like their backs would break and screamed silently up to heaven. Every amethyst vein in the mountain flashed so bright it seared their lines into her vision.

The Butcher of the Burning Dusk rose up and struck her father like a comet flung from a ballista, and nine bolts of lightning fell from the storm crown above to strike them at their joining.

The triumphant cry of a heavenly chorus rose up to accompany an outpouring of glory and a Hero’s passionate might as the man they called the Butcher advanced to the ninth rank of the Heroic Realm.

Selene ran.

—-

Selene was only sixteen years old, but she knew more of Heroes and Tyrants than most. She was a Heroine herself, and had seen the acts of Tyrants in the hearts of those that sought her out, and in the dreams the late kyrios warned her not to turn away from.

None of it had prepared her for the reality of a Hero and a Tyrant’s clash.

She ran towards the sun, moving faster than a hunting cat, and yet it felt like she was wading through mud in comparison to her father and the Butcher. The impact of their blades striking one another shook the air and made the sun beams waver and distort like a desert mirage. One such impact would have been jarring enough on its own, but they moved so fast that it was less a series of blows, and more a single uninterrupted clash. The mirage effect deepened and spread as the seconds passed, as if the sun was bleeding out across the sky.

Her father’s domain churned like it was made of ocean waves instead of marble and clay. Buildings that had stood for centuries before Selene was born exploded at the touch of a stray attack, or simply shook themselves apart as the mountain rocked and heaved underneath. Stallions of blood-orange flame raced through the air above her head at blistering speed, hundreds of them charging the Butcher head on while hundreds more raced circles around him, seeking to tangle him up in their trailing reins.

Polyzalus was the greater of the two of them and it showed in every exchange. More than that, he was a Tyrant in his own domain, even if half of that domain had somehow been contested. Every lash of his blade trailed an echoing boom, swift enough to outpace the wind and strong enough to cut through anything short of adamant. The fight should have been over in an instant.

Yet, despite the fact that he was as an ant before a lion, the Hero’s pneuma did not once waver. It flooded the world around him, pressing back against her father’s unshakeable authority as it grew, and it didn’t stop.

What did it mean for a Hero to fight a Tyrant? It was a topic that lent itself well to sophistry because it happened so rarely outside of epics, and it was the nature of a thinking man to gnaw at any topic that couldn’t bite them back. Some said a clash between the two was a clash of passion against purpose. Others, especially here, likened it to the kindling of a democratic flame. Once, Selene had heard a poet describe such an event as spring usurping summer.

They were wrong, each and every one of them so laughably wrong. This was no high minded exchange. There was no poetry in this. Selene ran like she had lightning in her heels, and with every step she only grew further away from the unraveling of her home.

She knew she wasn’t slowing down, that the Butcher was instead raising the pace of the violence at an unbelievable rate. But still, she couldn’t shake the illusion. She had dreams like this. Outlandish, abrupt, and always given away by her body’s inability to keep up with her mind’s demands. For a cultivator, that was only ever a concern in one’s nightmares.

In fact, maybe this was a nightmare. The more she thought of it, the more it rang true. What else could this possibly be?

Rattled and afraid - afraid for her father, afraid for her defenseless mother, afraid for the people of the Burning Dusk and the Raging Heaven Cult - Selene didn’t notice how close she’d come to the bisecting line until the vibration of another clash broke the stone beneath her right foot, and sent her stumbling sideways nearly over the edge of it.

The shadow of her hallowed weapon - and surely that was another point in the nightmare’s favor, because she had no recollection of grabbing it - stretched across the bisecting chasm, the penumbral spear sliding briefly into the contested half of her fathers domain.

Rattled and afraid, and most importantly, off-balance, Selene was caught entirely off guard, when a hand shot out from the eastern shadows and seized her penumbral spear like it was a corporeal thing. When the hand yanked the shadow back it brought the actual spear along with it. Selene was dragged across the fault line, beyond the boundary of forever dusk-

“No!”

-and out of her father’s world.

She fell into the shadow of a courtyard ruin and immediately called upon her full strength. She was too slow as it was. She didn’t have time for this. She-

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“Solus?” She whispered. The son of Rome drew the veil back from his face, and his eyes all but lit up the broken courtyard. They were silver-bright. She had never seen such intensity.

“-you hurt? Selene?”

She gasped, forcing her treacherous limbs into motion. She seized him by the shoulders.

“What have you done?! Why are you here? You can’t-” she searched his soul reflexively, vainly, hoping he had somehow transcended eight ranks since the last time she had seen him. But no. He was burning hot to every one of her senses, but he was still a Philosopher.

“I came to make right what Bakkhos left wrong,” he said, and her mind reeled as the name rang her mind like a gong. He glanced up at the brutal reality of high minded discourse, and though his eyes narrowed, they didn’t dim at all. They only grew brighter. “I was naïve, but it’s not over yet. We can still salvage this.”

“Are you out of your mind?” she hissed, shaking him by the shoulders. Without her heart flame to bolster her, it barely moved him. “You’ll die. No, you have to leave now! Do you understand me? You’ll-”

Solus covered her mouth. The skin of his hand was burning heart. He looked alive.

“I didn’t come here to die,” the son of Rome told her, smiling fiercely.

Ah. So she was dreaming after all.

A burning war horse slammed through the last column still standing in the ruined courtyard, screaming and thrashing in fury and pain. The spell broke and Solus bolted in through the rubble, pulling her along like a banner until she found her feet.

They raced up the mountain together, their paces somehow evenly matched despite her higher standing. He moved like a ghost, and bounded like a hunting wolf through the shadows cast by the setting sun.

Above their heads, Selene watched her father’s personal militia join themselves to his efforts. Men and women she knew by name after years being guarded by them rose up against the Butcher, senior Philosophers in the dozens. She watched them mount burning war horses and charge up fracturing mountain paths like they were flat road. She saw them cast rhetoric of every kind at the everburning star of the Butcher, each of their techniques bolstered beyond their mortal capability by the man that held the reins.

The Butcher swept them aside in the dozens as they came, cutting through flesh and living flame without breaking the rhythm of their exchange. Those that were knocked back deeper into the western hemisphere of her father’s domain were caught and cast up again, all but the worst injuries burning away like they had never been.

Those that the Butcher had cast down into the eastern hemisphere received no such protection. They broke, and they bled, and they burned where the war horses touched their skin.

It took an eternity too long, but finally Selene regained her senses.

“This is the end,” she realized.

“Not yet.”

Dread stole the swiftness from her steps until she was standing still, watching the rubble of her home and the broken bodies of its people rain down. Solus seized her penumbral spear again, but this time she just let him rip it from her hand.

“There’s still a path forward,” he told her, earnest as she’d ever heard him.

Selene shook her head. “No, not anymore. My father won’t stop until one of them is dead, and winning will cost him just as much as losing. This is what the other Elders have been waiting for this whole time. This is the opening they’ve been looking for.”

“It’s not too late to stop them,” Solus insisted, and she grit her teeth as steam gathered at the corners of her eyes.

“No one on this earth can stop my father,” she said, defeated. “Not even me.”

“Not even his wife?”

A second raven joined the first, bare chested and radiating vitality. From his black feather cloak he pulled a golden cup. Selene’s heart skipped a beat in her chest.

“Is that-?”

Solus offered her spear back to her. She took it.

—--

The sovereign estate of the Tyrant Polyzalus sat near the top of the territory allocated to the Burning Dusk Cult by the kyrios. It was a grand monument, larger than the next two largest estates put together, and it was where her mother had slept for sixteen years since her daughter’s birth.

The ravens ran out of shadows large enough to stalk through the moment they entered the estate, but that didn’t stop them for a moment. When the first of the guards sworn to her mother’s service raised the alarm and struck out at them with burning rhetoric, Selene hesitated for half a step. It only took her a moment to override her instincts - these were her mothers guardians. She had grown up begging them to tell her stories - but in that time Solus and Griffon acted.

Shields shattered and rhetoric parted like water around them when they struck. Griffon punched and grappled with pankration hands alive with rosy heat, and when the disciples of Burning Dusk tried to overpower his foundational technique with their own, he blindsided them with palms of crackling lightning. Solus charged through armored men like they were children, and when Griffon’s pankration hands offered him up a weapon it had scavenged from the floor, he launched it down the hall with a siege construct’s punishing force.

Selene knew she wasn’t a fighter. She never had been, and her father had never pushed her to become one. she knew that, and yet somewhere along the way she had deluded herself into believing the rising tide of advancement lifted all ships. She had never seen a battlefield with her own eyes, and only rarely set foot in the gymnasium, but she was still a Hero. Surely, if the need arose, she would rise to the occasion.

Griffon and Solus ripped through the halls of her father’s estate like violence incarnate, never once betraying themselves in hesitation, and the term martial cultivation clicked into place inside her mind.

In this regard, they were far more than their standing suggested. And by that same measure, she was far less. For the first time, Selene wondered if an oracle could still serve if they walked the martial path.

She’d have to ask her mother.

——

The sovereign suite was quiet.

It didn’t make any sense at all, but then, it never had. Here, it was always serene quiet, and the sun was always setting just past the veranda. Her father had made a sanctuary of this place by overriding the kyrios authority with his own. Here, and only here, the kyrios had allowed it.

Not for any affection between the two of them. Bakkhos allowed the sovereign suite’s construction out of consideration for the woman housed within it.

They entered like a calamity, Sol’s lowered shoulder and Griffon’s violent intent tearing the bronze door out of its frame and sending it skidding across the unbroken marble floor. The moment they stepped foot inside, however, they went still. Their chests heaved while their pupils shivered, the terrible thrill of it all still very much within them. But no more than that.

Warm light from a false sun spilled across the Oracle’s sleeping figure and illuminated the portions of her mother that her father loved most. The delicate slope of her neck, the soft, half smile her lips always tended towards, the nails she had always painted the color of her faith.

The Scarlet Oracle Calliope lay at apparent rest on her birthing bed, looking for all the world like she was only resting briefly. The only sign that gave lie to the illusion was the ornamental knife resting flat over her stomach, her limp hands folded over it. The same knife she had used in her last waking act to cut the cord connecting her to her newborn daughter.

Selene whispered the same prayer she always did as she stepped into the silent suite. Her voice shook, but only a little.

Griffon took a single step forward, then looked down as if seeing himself for the first time. He ripped the raven’s mantle off and cast it aside. In his hand he held the cup of nectar.

“Are you sure?” Selene asked in a hushed voice. Her heart beat like a cornered rabbit’s. Her mind was in half a dozen places, but in her mother’s peaceful sleeping face was all she could focus on. She didn’t know what she would do if he told her now.

“I’m sure of what I’ve seen,” Griffon answered, an odd wonder in his voice. He took another careful step towards the nursing bed. “And I’m sure they’ve never tried this.”

“Nectar from the Flame,” Solus said, quietly, suddenly by her side. “If this isn’t enough, nothing will be.” Though she couldn’t have explained why, Selene remained rooted in place. Solus remained by her side, steady as a stone.

Griffon paused, inhaled and exhaled, and took the final step towards the bed.

The manifested hands of his violent intent dipped beneath her mother’s head and lifted her gently until she was halfway between prone and upright. Griffon watched her carefully for any signs of discomfort, and at the same time he drank the sight of her in with his eyes.

Solus sucked in a breath, like he’d been sucker punched. Selene didn’t have a fraction of her attention to split.

With one of his true hands, Griffin cupped the Scarlet Oracle’s jaw, and applied just enough pressure to part her lips. With the other true hand, he pressed the rim of the golden cup to her tongue. He tilted the cup, slowly, torturously, and Selene was certain every moment was going to be the last before she woke up from this terrible and incredible dream.

Finally, after ten eternities, Griffon drew back the empty cup. He didn’t say a word. None of them did. They only watched. And waited.

Waited.

… Waited.

“No,” Griffon said in quiet disbelief.

“More,” Selene said. “Give her the rest.” When neither of them moved, she gripped Solus’ elbow so hard her knuckles turned white. “Where is the rest of it? You had to have made more than one cup.”

Solus laid a hand over hers and gently pried it away. It trembled in his grip.

“That was all of it,” he told her heavily.

Griffon snarled. “All of it but a drop.”

Solus looked sharply at him. “A drop wouldn’t have made the difference.”

No. Not like this.

“It made the difference in that healing house.”

She refused.

“And you just fed her a thousand times that portion.”

Selene would not allow it.

Griffon’s retort died in his throat as she appeared by his side and dipped her finger into the cup. His livid glare turned to razor focus as she ran her finger around the inner rim of the cup. She raised that wine-stained finger to her mouth and took for herself the drop that had clung to the sides. The taste was everything she had ever loved, combined and accentuated by perfect harmony. An impossibly good flavor.

Her oracle’s eye opened wide, and Selene looked upon her mother with a higher power’s sight.

And she saw it.

The cord cutting blade had a handle of polished gold, dented and shaped in such a way that the oracle’s hand would sink perfectly into it when she grabbed it. Selena marveled at how natural it felt to hold as she pulled it from her mother’s listless hands. She saw the questions in their eyes as she raised it above her mothers head.

“Growing up,” a stranger murmured in her voice. She felt as if she was a thousand leagues away. “When my father wanted to comfort me or the kyrios wanted to rile me, they would both tell me the same thing.”

You are all the greatest portions of your mother.

“I took something crucial from her the day that I was born.” The nectar burned brighter than a star in her oracular sight, nearly as bright as the golden light pouring out of them, and it coursed through her mother’s body in search of a catalyst that was no longer there to be found. Her majesty.

The adamant blade cut through the skin of her palm like It wasn’t there at all.

“I have to give it back,” she declared, and poured her blood into Calliope’s open mouth.

She watched it tread the same path as the nectar. She watched it join itself to the heavenly elixir, building, burning-

The oracle’s finger twitched.

There was a reaction. Some sound, an exclamation. She didn’t hear it. She was a thousand leagues away, and at the same time she was frozen in this perfect moment. She watched the blood flow. The more of it the nectar found the more that burning wonder was bolstered. Like a seed planted in the hollow of an uprooted cypress, the Oracle’s scarlet majesty steadily bloomed.

Someone said something. She ignored it. A few moments later she was rewarded with the slightest flicker of motion behind the Oracle’s closed eyes.

Almost. Just a bit more, and-

Sol heaved her bodily away from the bed and the Oracle’s eye slammed shut. Selene gasped like she had been drowning, abruptly aware of how cold she felt. The adamant knife slipped from her fingers.

“Enough,” the Roman said firmly, lowering her to the floor when it became clear she wasn’t fighting him. “If the first barrel wasn’t enough, a second won’t help.”

“I saw it,” she told him, standing under her own power and letting warmth slowly return to her body. “It’s working. It’s so close, she’s so close, we just -“ her voice cracked. “We were so close.”

Sol left an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into it, breathing shakily and struggling to see-

Selene froze. “Griffon. What are you doing?”

“Giving back,” he said, and drew the adamant edge across his own scarred palm. He dropped the bloody knife back onto the bed and cupped his palms together. He held them above her mother’ mouth and let the blood pool. He was going to ruin it.

Selene lurched forward in terror, only for Sol to plant his feet and heave her back again. She burned her heart’s blood and called upon a Hero’s strength.

“Watch,” Solus urged her. Her body betrayed her again. She hesitated.

Griffon closed his eyes and mouthed something silently. Then he parted his cut hands a fraction, allowing a strand of blood to fall into the Oracle’s open mouth.

Calliope gasped.

Selene’s entire world shrank down to a single point - her mother’s face. She watched speechlessly as her nose wrinkled, and her eyebrows drew down. She watched the Oracle’s lips purse at what was no doubt an unpleasant taste left behind by human blood. She watched as her golden eyelashes fluttered.

Selene watched her mother’s scarlet eyes open for the first time since she was born.

The full weight of the Scarlet Oracle’s majesty flooded the sovereign suite. Burning heat and scouring rosy light filled every corner of the estate and spilled out over the veranda, reaching out to the false dusk outside. It was like standing in the center of a bonfire. It felt like never being cold again.

Calliope stared up at the man above her, a thousand emotions playing behind scarlet eyes. Then, finally, she spoke. Her voice was brittle from disuse, and soft with wonder.

“Who are you?”

Griffon smiled like the sun, and answered.

“My name is Lio Aetos. I was born eighteen years ago beneath a scarlet sun and swaddled by my mother in an oracle’s veil. I am the first and only heir of Damon Aetos.” With every word, her mother’s wonder deepened. Her lips parted, her eyebrows arched.

Griffon leaned in, and their features were a perfect match.

“I am your son, and I've come all this way to see you.”

A moment and an eternity too late, Selene realized the emotion behind that wonder wasn’t joy or excitement.

“Stop!” Solus roared, lunging past her.

It was grief. It was dismay.

With tears in her eyes, Calliope condemned him.

“Liar.”

And she drove the adamant knife into her throat.