The Son of Rome
The mask settled with its painted features facing up, angled so that the distraught woman seemed to wail up at its owner. Griffon stared at it in numb despair.
We were out of time.
Scythas appeared in our path, his long hair whipping in the wind. His passage through the storm crown was written all across his frame. Thin, branching scars covered his visible skin, raw red remnants of tribulation wrath. His grass-green cult attire was drenched by blood and rainwater, torn in so many places it hardly looked like a single piece anymore. Far worse than any of those wounds, though, was the look on his face. My heart hammered double-time in my chest.
“Solus,” he said, begging me with broken eyes, “what are you doing?”
Ah.
Selene pushed up from the ground with one arm, the other reaching slowly for her fold in paradox logic where she kept her spear. She eyed the Hero of the Scything Squall carefully. When she spoke, her words were more than just soothing. Whether she did it consciously or not, I tracked the motion of her pneuma as it coated her words and reached out across the gap between them.
“Scythas, this isn’t-“
“Quiet,” he hissed, and stole the wind from her voice. Burning hazel eyes rooted me in place. This time he demanded answers from me. “What is this? What happened to the Oracle? What happened to the alliance? Why are you running away?”
There were more. Five cultivators in the first rank of the Heroic realm converged on us like a closing snare. I exhaled slowly, steadying myself. My heart beat faster still, cold dread warring with golden heat in my chest.
The Heroes arrived one by one. Elissa landed beside Scythas with her bronze blade already drawn. Her scarred face was twisted by furious accusation. Jason landed in a heavy crouch between us and them, the pressure of his panicked pneuma pulverizing every stone within arms reach. The carved stones dangling from his necklaces rattled against his breast plate as he shifted back-and-forth, uncertainty pulling him in two directions.
Kyno touched down lightly beside Elissa, throwing off steam like a forge from his crocodile cloak. The crocodile’s maw hung low, obscuring his eyes. The tightening of his jaw and the clenching of his fists as he looked down at Griffon said more than enough. Anastasia arrived, not from above, but from the side. She came striding out to join us from the shadows of a nearby alley - or what remained of it. A widow’s black veil covered her face. She had her javelin in hand, burning with caustic heat.
Déjà vu tilted the world around me. We were facing opposite directions, but there was no doubt in my mind. It was the same alley, and this was the same pavilion.
“Heaven beats its drums. Are you ready to dance?”
We only needed one more, and we’d be right back where we started.
I pivoted on my heel an instant before Jason shouted a warning. A line of sensation too bright to be painful drew a line across the bridge of my nose, an arrow that screamed to all of my senses piercing through the earth and promptly vanishing. It carried on faster than I could consciously track until it was gone entirely - burrowing past the lower limits of my sphere’s awareness.
Lefteris descended in wrath, cratering the raised dais that the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had hammered their funeral drums on so many weeks ago. The three fingers he used to draw back his bow string were a bloody ruin. He glared down at Griffon and I, not with suspicion or desperation, but with black unfettered hatred.
The Gold-String Guardian drew another arrow from the gap in his own paradox logic, drawing it back without a word. I saw my death in his eyes. I’d only narrowly dodged the first arrow because of the distance and because I had started pivoting the instant I felt his pneuma shift along the bow’s golden string. If he shot me again, I would be hit. If he shifted his target, Griffon wouldn’t even try to dodge. My heart raced faster still.
Jason and Kyno saved us, converging on either side of the Heroic archer and wrestling his bow away from us. Now the archer spoke, howling at the top of his lungs.
“I told you! I told all of you, at every turn, and you didn’t listen!” His heart’s flame blazed as he fought viciously against the two men restraining him. “I’ll kill you! I’ll tear you apart, leave nothing for your wretched soul to scavenge! I’ll grind your bones to dust!”
“I’d like to see you try,” Jason growled, wrenching his bow arm back.
“Just breathe, Left!” Kyno urged him. Even with the difference in their stature, the hulking man in the crocodile skin was struggling to hold back his friend’s nocking arm. “This isn’t the moment! The boys need you to be-“
Lefteris shouted, grieving as much as he was hating. A lead weight settled in my stomach.
“Solus.” Scythas stepped forward. His pneuma was a mess of jumbled currents, a thousand streams converging on his heart. “Speak to us. Tell us what’s going on.”
“As if we didn’t already know.” Elissa leveled her sword at us, glaring down at Griffon, and her anger swiftly boiled over. “They strummed us like a lyre. From the very beginning, they sang and danced and promised us everything under the sun, never once intending to deliver it. They lied to our faces. They used us as tools.”
“Let the man speak!” Jason shouted. The Sword Song rounded on him.
“Enough of barking dogs!”
Scythas took another step towards us - towards me. Selene crept back, crouching protectively beside Griffon. In the corner of my eye, I saw Anastasia pace a wide circle around us.
“This wasn’t your plan,” Scythas spoke, as if he could manifest the truth of it. I shook my head. “Then why? What happened after you left us in the storm? Why didn’t you bring us with you? Why aren’t you fighting?”
Each question brought him a step closer. Each question brought to my attention another golden path that I had overlooked when it mattered the most. I saw them spiraling out in their hundreds behind each of the six Heroic cultivators - how many paths to victory had I overlooked? How many times had I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?
How many lives had I ended in a single day?
“I took you for a wolf,” Anastasia said softly, audible amidst the violent din only because Scythas delivered the words to me. Her black veil glowed caustic green at its edges. “But now I don’t know what you are. This isn’t how a captain acts - you’ve divided, but left yourself no path to conquer. What is your plan, Solus?”
“Solus,” Selene whispered urgently, eyes flickering from threat to threat.
“Solus!” Jason shouted desperately, while Lefteris seethed and thrashed out of his grip.
“Solus.” Scythas took another step forward.
Manifesting intent was a process that required practice, familiarity, and unshakable focus. I was not my brother, and I was only just now beginning to understand how horribly I had neglected the finer details of my refinement, but I was as focused as I had ever been. I cast out my pneuma, shaping my vital essence to a purpose that I was well familiar with.
My spear intent was a sloppy thing at best, without question a junior philosopher’s first effort, and I watched the bewilderment bloom in their eyes as their senses told them the truth of that. Regardless, it was enough. The spear of my intent manifested in the air just in front of the Hero of the Scything Squall and cut a jagged line through the street.
Scythas stared down at the line, then back up to me. The rest of the five watched intensely. My heart thundered, drowning out all else but this moment. These people.
“No further,” I declared, and Scythas flinched like I had slapped him. “If any of you cross this line, consider your ties to me severed.”
“What?” Scythas asked quietly. I swallowed back my bile.
“The Scarlet Oracle is dead,” I told them, and watched horrified understanding break like the dawn in their eyes. “I had plans for all of this, and for all of you, but none of them matter now.”
“Whose blood is that?” Elissa abruptly asked, leveling her sword at Griffon’s blood-stained hands. When he failed to acknowledge her, the Heroine’s pneuma spiked. “Answer me!”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Selene’s voice wavered, but somehow she held steady above her grief. She stared down the Sword Song resolutely. “My mother took her own life. I swear it on my soul.”
For a moment, the scarred Heroine was lost for words. Her eyes cut into me. “What have you done to this girl?”
“What have you done to us?” Kyno asked.
Anastasia’s head tilted, like she was looking at something incomprehensible. “Who are you, really?”
“What do your tyrants say?” I asked her. Each of them was inundated with the smoke stench of their elder’s influence, and not for the first time I cursed myself for leaving them behind in the storm.
“They say you’re fakers,” Elissa spat.
“Murderers,” Lefteris seethed.
“Sophists.” Kyno’s answer was delivered with the least heat, but it discomforted them all the most. They watched me expectantly, one and all. Even Lefteris held his breath, waiting for me to deny it.
I didn’t.
“Even now!?” Scythas exploded, advancing forward with his fists clenched. “People are dying, Solus! The world is falling down around your ears and you’re still pretending-?”
Gravitas.
The captain’s virtue struck the Hero center mass, sending him skidding back across the line. It didn’t move him much further than that, less than ten paces. I braced myself for the retaliation of the fifth legion. It didn’t come.
I’d found it. Too little too late, but I had found an answer nonetheless.
“… it’s enough.” Scythas hadn’t even been knocked over by my attack, let alone injured, yet his body began to tremble. “Just stop it already.”
“Who are you still trying to fool!?” Jason cried out, lurching to the edge of the dais. “Haven’t we proven ourselves yet? Is this not the moment you’ve been waiting for all this time?”
Olympia was coming apart at its every seam - if the Tyrants kept on as they were, the sanctuary city would be a smoking ruin long before the next dawn broke. Would-be champions were fleeing the conflict in droves, picking off rivals and looting from the dead and dying on their way out of the city. Those left behind in the stadium were trapped in their own bloody crucible, ripping their fellow athletes apart and basking in the victory glow of tribulation lightning - gladiators laying their lives on the line for a crowd of empty seats. An era was ending.
Is this not the moment?
Somehow, it was.
“Last year I was a slave,” I said. Jason shook his head, denying the thought entirely, and the rest weren’t far behind him. I didn’t wait for them to put words to it. “The year before that I was a Legate in command of three thousand men - but not because I had earned it. I was only seventeen years old when I was given that distinction. I’m only twenty years old today.”
“Stop it!” Jason shouted. “Just-!”
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“Anastasia knows.”
The Heroine of the Blind Maiden Cult had known from the beginning. A physician only needed a brief moment of contact to read their patient’s body like a book. From the moment her fingers had brushed across my shoulder in that shadowed alley, Anastasia had known the truth of my age.
Expectation shifted briefly onto the Caustic Queen, imploring her to deny me. Instead, she struck to the heart of it all.
“Age is not a prerequisite for advancement,” she said accusingly. “There have been younger Heroes than you. There have even been younger Tyrants.”
It was my fault. I had no one but myself to blame for this person they had built up in their heads. Every bold-faced lie, every empty promise, all of the false assumptions and misunderstandings - I had allowed them all to pass without clarification. And for what? Because it suited my needs? Because I had thought the matter settled already? Because I was tired of repeating myself, resigned to being misconstrued by flighty Greeks? Excuses. Pitiful, monstrous excuses.
The truth was that even after everything, a part of me had still wanted to be that man. The captain that Gaius had expected me to be, that the fifth legion had needed me to be. A vile, treacherous portion of my soul had yearned for that second chance. After all, I had nothing left to lose. If I succeeded, I could suffer my punishment in the afterlife with dignity. And if I failed, what did it matter?
[Seek safer shores.]
If only I had known it from the start.
“A Legate is worthless without his legion, and mine was slaughtered to a man.” I stated it plainly. They deserved that much, my bright and shining soldiers. “My foundations as a cultivator are split in two. The half of me that is Roman might as well not be a cultivator at all now. The half of me that is Greek entered the Sophic Realm the day before I was made a slave to Damon Aetos.”
Their pneuma rose precipitously, disbelief and betrayal and rage manifesting each in their own unique way. I forged on ahead, dragging all of it out into the light.
“The day I arrived in this city was the same day that the Rosy Dawn’s Young Aristocrat freed me from my shackles. I am exactly what I appear to be. Half a Legate with no legion, and half a Philosopher on his twelfth step to divinity.”
I forced myself not to look away when the light dimmed in Scythas’ eyes.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” Jason clutched his head, his pneuma pressing in as if to crush himself. “I refuse! I won’t believe it!”
“The Rosy Dawn has a Young Aristocrat,” Elissa spoke, and for the first time since her arrival there was no bite to her voice. She was staring at Griffin. Staring at his clean and mended robes.
“Impossible,” Anastasia said immediately. “The hunting bird’s breath is infamous - I would have recognized the Aetos’ mark on him immediately. His channels are shaped for something else entirely.”
“Lio,” Kyno breathed. Lefteris jerked back.
“What!?” the archer demanded. Kyno didn’t respond, staring at the kneeling Sophist in sudden understanding
“Not a lion, nor an eagle.”
A Griffon.
“No,” Anastasia denied it twice, her funeral veil smoking as its edges burned. She slashed at the air with a flat hand, casting the notion aside. “What sort of heir would lack something so fundamental? What kind of father would allow it?”
“What does your Tyrant say?” I asked her again.
“What does it matter?” Scythas asked quietly. “They’re all liars.” I inclined my head, acknowledging the point.
“The things that you’ve said,” the fair Hero from the Hurricane Heights continued, the wind rising slowly as he spoke, “the actions that you’ve taken- those aren’t- they couldn’t have been-“
He struggled for the words. I didn’t know if it was a cruelty or a kindness, but I supplied them in his stead.
“They couldn’t have been the actions of someone so weak?” I asked. Scythas gnashed his teeth, and I buried the dagger deeper. I would drag all of it, all of it, out into the light. “And if they were? What would that make us?”
“Mad.”
Anastasia’s bleak answer was the end of it.
“No,” Jason groaned. “No, no, no.”
If not their Tyrants or their hearts, who else was left that could convince them?
I stood tall.
“What do your Muses say?”
Glory and Heroic heat exploded from their every pore, five Heroic souls rousing fully awake. Somehow, even after the Butcher’s display and the horror of eight Tyrants clashing, it still shocked me to my core. This was the distance between a mortal and divinity. This was the gap.
How had I ever thought I could stand up to this alone?
“She says that you’re cowards,” spoke Elissa, condemning.
“She says that you’ll drown in the Styx,” spoke Lefteris, hating.
“She says that you’ve reached beyond your station,” spoke Kyno, lamenting.
“She says that you’re getting stronger,” spoke Anastasia, dreading.
“She says I must defeat you,” Scythas spoke, despairing. “She says this is my only chance.”
What else was there to say?
They attacked together, all of them but Jason, and I lost before the battle had even begun. Understanding meant nothing in the face of overwhelming strength. It didn’t matter that I could see their pneuma in motion. It made no difference that my body was stronger and faster than it had ever been. They were Heroes and I was not. The rules of nature bent and broke around them, and those same rules bound my soul in iron shackles.
Selene was an instant too slow. It wasn’t her fault. This wasn’t the world that she had been raised to live in. If not for my hubris, she wouldn’t have been here at all.
Griffon was somewhere else, dead to it all. He hadn’t blinked once since his sash had come apart. There was no fight left in his soul.
I was reaching, grasping for something that had never been within my reach in the first place. My pneumatic sense showed me what my eyes were too dull to catch.
Elissa and Kyno were there as if the space between us had never existed to begin with, the Sword Song’s bronze blade thrusting for Griffon’s heart while the Huntsman drove a wicked skinning knife towards his eye. Behind them, Lefteris had drawn back his bow’s gold string to the limits of its frame, aiming a blazing arrow at my brother’s throat.
And there was Anastasia by my side, her healing hands moving towards a swift and merciful execution - two burning fingers moving to drive straight through my temple. Scythas’ blade was already biting into my neck. Jason was there between them, reaching out to stop them both, but it wasn’t quite enough.
You lose.
You’ve lost.
This one’s your loss again!
It’s enough.
You think so too, don’t you?
At least you can tell them that you tried.
Rest easy.
The battle was lost before you were born-
No.
The space between their actions and my reaction was less than a second - an eternity too long. The space between their actions and our deaths was slim enough it could have been mistaken for no space at all. There was no time for any mortal creature to act. No time for even a hummingbird's heart to beat.
I refuse.
My heart beat once.
What-!
The golden lifeblood of the Titan Flame was a force of unstoppable refinement. It could be put towards almost any cultivator’s purpose, so long as the path forward was made clear and so long as it was given time to circulate throughout the body. That I had been forced to put its refinement of my pneumatic sense on hold wasn’t an indictment of the ichor. The diminishing returns I had to run up against were a failing of mine.
Fool that I was, I hadn’t realized until it was all but too late that the only thing limiting Prometheus’ golden ichor was my heart’s ability to pump it through my body. I should have been focusing all of its efforts on my heart from the start. I had realized that, finally, and then Scythas had stopped us in our tracks and I had run out of time. I’d had no choice but to make my own time while the ichor did its frantic work. I’d had no choice but to hope it was enough.
My heart beat twice. The flames behind their eyes flickered.
It’s not enough.
I don’t care.
You’re not enough.
It doesn’t matter.
You’ll never be enough.
I know.
The more you try, the more you’ll bring to ruin.
And yet.
The world would flourish in your passing.
Even so.
Why? So that you can live to die more hated tomorrow? What will you do when victory is no longer even a concept your mind can comprehend? What will you do when you run out of games to lose?
[What will you do when Raging Heaven strikes you down?]
What other answer could there be?
[I’LL RISE.]
My pneuma doubled and redoubled, driven to advancement by the appearance of a higher ideal. I ascended from the second rank of the Sophic realm to the third. A laughable improvement compared to what I faced. It was little more than a shower of sparks against five roaring flames.
Those sparks flew. My heart beat a third and final time before I died.
!!!!!!!!
Prometheus’ golden ichor went up in flames.
Six Heroic cultivators drew back in terror and disbelief as golden heat erupted from my eyes, and I clenched my grasping hand into a fist.
Beginning with our race down from the storm crown and ending with the drawing of a line, I had used my newfound awareness to scour the depths of my soul for a solution to the impairment imposed upon my virtue in Thracia. I had felt the first hint of its source when I invoked the captain’s virtue to anchor Griffon and I through the death throes of six heroes - there was a schism in my soul, a schism that Socrates had explained to me months ago in the late kyrios’ estate, and only half of it had raged at my usage of it. Only the Roman half of my foundation had penalized me for my presumption.
I had sought control over my split foundation while we fled the rioting Tyrants, flexing through trial and error two separate muscles that I had spent my whole life believing were one. Once I had learned the trick of moving one half without the other, it was only a question of subordination. The Roman captain’s virtue was found in the guidance of subordinate souls. So long as they were the soldiers to my captain, I could never leverage my virtue against our Heroic companions without invoking the Fifth’s wrath.
So I’d drawn a line in the sand. A line dividing the Roman from the Greek.
And they’d crossed it.
“Gravitas,” I intoned.
The Greek half of my virtue was pitiful in comparison to the Roman, hardly strong enough to knock Scythas back ten paces. If the Roman half of my virtue was the strength of those I did not deserve to lead, the Greek half was my own power. The strength to carry thirty men, if only just. It wasn’t nearly strong enough for this fight.
But that could change.
I took the golden flame in hand, burnt away my heart’s blood, and spent all that time on this moment.
The Greek captain’s virtue took hold of six Heroic cultivators and flung them up to heaven - along with the entirety of the great city’s agora. Blocks upon blocks of city streets rose up, all of their blasted out homes, their uprooted trees, and the molten slag left behind by the rein-holder’s whip. It all came away from the earth as if suddenly untethered. As if the axis of creation had shifted for them alone, and they were falling.
Jason, Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, Anastasia, and Scythas fell up along with the wreckage, bonelessly at first, but then twisting and writhing in a helpless effort to escape their ascent.
Without looking back, I pointed down at my own shadow and the grasping hands reaching up from it.
“At ease,” I said firmly. Gravitas crushed them flat against my silhouette.
The fire burned and burned.
I stepped past Griffon and slammed my spear through the theater mask as I went. The force shattered it like it was made ceramic instead of wood, and Griffon lurched in place.
“Wretched brother of my blood. Your origins are hopelessly grim,” I told him. “But this life is yours to live. If your story ends as it began, it’ll be because you chose it.”
I kept on marching, burning as I went. Far, far above, Scythas twisted and stared down at the city of Olympia in flat incomprehension. Then his eyes flickered, moving frenetically as they traced a path only he could see.
The Hero of the Scything Squall whistled a shrill note and shot back down to earth like he’d been fired from a ballista. The wind gave him his current, and his muse provided him a path down through the rising wreckage.
The whirlwind carried him past me and behind, to strike me in my blindspot. I glanced back over my shoulder. Our eyes met.
Selene lunged between us and stabbed her ceremonial spear through his chest. He hung there in weightless shock - his feet still hadn’t touched the ground.
The Oracle’s daughter flooded pneuma through her spear, and Scythas’ expression went slack as her oracular technique took hold. Then Selene pivoted, spinning on her heel to build momentum and throwing him off her spear with a shout of effort. The Hero’s limp body hurtled into the distant western districts and vanished through the smoke.
Five stars burned brighter than the rest in the skies above our heads as the rest of our opposition called upon their foundational techniques. Even now, their glory far outshone me.
“I’m with you, Solus,” Selene promised, stepping up beside me and glaring resolutely at the stars.
It would have to be enough.
I reached out, grasping at the distant Heroes and the displaced agora and closing my fist around them. I burned and burned, feeding borrowed power into the captain’s virtue. I dragged my arm sideways and swung it down, pointing west towards the distant Ionian.
A sound like mountains breaking and oceans boiling to mist heralded the shifting of axis, everything in the grip of my virtue ceasing to fall up and instead falling sideways. It was enough to gutter out the techniques the Heroes had been bringing to bear, but only just. Already they were fighting through it to close the distance by various means.
“What next, cultivator?” The Scarlet Oracle asked me.
“We fight.” I kept marching on, striding forward to meet them.
“And if we lose?”
“We rise. We fight again.”
Until the heavens fell.