Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall

There’s still time, but less and less.

You have the stronger heart.

He isn’t what you thought he was. You can bring him down.

You can defeat him.

You must defeat him.

This is your only chance.

My dear hero, you have to move.

You have to fight!

You have to do it now-!

The spear plunged straight through his heart, yet it hardly hurt at all. The Scarlet Oracle’s eyes burned scarlet, glaring into his, and the world spun around him. Scythas was flung, fell, and skipped across marble like a stone over still water. The tumble hurt worse than the stab.

Scythas propped himself up on a scraped and bleeding elbow, prodding at the wound in his chest. Or rather, prodding the place where the wound should have been. Prodding with fingers that should have been longer. Panic stabbed straight through his heart, and there at last he felt the pain. The panic.

“No,” he breathed. His voice was pitched higher than it should’ve been. Higher than it had been in years.

A storm had been raging in the city of Olympia when the Oracle stabbed him with her hallowed spear. Only a moment ago, they had all been in the center of it. Now that storm was gone, another had taken its place. As he watched, it consumed all that remained of the Half-Step City. Everything gave away to the wind until all that remained was the center of the eye.

The Oracle stepped past him. Scythas lunged for her trailing skirt in terror.

“Please!” he cried out in a child’s helpless panic. “Not this! Anything, but this!”

His body didn’t move as it should have, too small to accommodate his mind’s demands. She slipped through his fingers and carried on towards the edge of the eye. The world beyond it was opaque, nothing more than a screaming wall of hurricane winds.

“Selene! Don’t leave me here!” he wailed, hating how familiar it felt to sob the words into the wind.

“I warned you, cultivator.” The words were melancholy, but the sun-kissed Heroine didn’t look back once. “I never cured your heart, only cut away the symptoms - you should have cleaned the wound. But you didn’t. You made no offerings and swore no oaths.”

The Oracle cast out her empty hand like she was tossing something away.

“I see now that it wasn’t mine to take.”

He didn’t want it back. He had no room for it in his heart - a new hurt had already sprung up to take its place. The rot she’d taken from him in Thracia would make the burden double.

“That isn’t fair.” He stumbled and crawled across the broken tiles. She was already gone. He screamed brokenly into the wind, “That isn’t fair!”

Even here, the wind carried her parting words to his ear.

“Once given and twice returned.”

As the Oracle vanished through the storm, a hand latched onto his thigh.

Scythas screamed and lurched away from it. His grass-green silks, still vibrant and new, tore away in the wind’s invisible grip. Another hand seized onto his ankle and tripped him up when he tried to run. Another settled on his shoulder and pressed him down. Two gripped his hips, ripping more and more of his silks away.

He thrashed and he struggled, calling upon his pneuma and the wind, but that only made the storm beyond the eye howl louder. He slipped out of his silks piece by piece, but the formless hands of wind only seized upon his skin, scratching bloody furrows through his flesh when he fought them.

“Urania!” Scythas called out to a Muse that had yet to claim him when he was still this young. He begged the heavenly diviner, “Help me! Please! Show me the way! Urania!”

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“I’m here,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against his. The relief was so powerful it nearly knocked him back down to the floor. A moment later, the hands did that themselves.

The Heavenly Muse pointed a slender finger, a path of shining stars spiraling out from its tip. Scythas traced them with his eyes, following them to their destination-

“I can’t.”

“You must.”

Urania’s path out was no path out at all. Rather than escape, it urged him to pursue. It pointed him towards the center of his festering heart.

“I’m not strong enough.”

“You are.”

Tears spilled down his cheeks.

“I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”

“You have all that you need.” she promised, whispering it like a secret in his ear. “The path is there before you. This much is all I can do.”

A hand of wanton wind fisted itself in his hair, twisting his face away from hers.

“Please.”

He felt her leave his heart just as Selene had done. And just the same, the wind carried her parting words to his ear while its greedy hands roamed.

They were the first words she had ever spoken to him, in the silence proceeding tragedy, delivered on the deck of a ship with no oars while black clouds and curtains of rain and rising waves darkened his horizon. Back then, same as now, she had only been able to offer him the path through it.

[“Your story is one of weathering storms.”]

Hands of howling wind weighed him down, spread him apart, and dug deep for his heart. Finally, as he always had, Scythas gave up on resistance. He was alone and he was weak. Struggling would only make it worse. All he could do was all that he had ever done - endure it. Weather it. Close his eyes and pray that it would pass-

“Such vile cynicism. I won’t forgive her for it.”

Subsumed by groping hands, Scythas nonetheless recognized the one that grasped his chin and lifted it up. It was firm and steady where the hands of wind were formless violence. It was cold, where Urania’s ethereal hand had been warm. Like stone.

A pewter rim pressed against his lips and liquid heat poured down his throat. It was the most delicious thing that Scythas had ever tasted. It was every good thing that had ever touched his tongue, joined together and made more - it was drinks and meals he had no conscious memory of, too young to have remembered. It was the heady mead his father had snuck him from his cup. It was his mother’s own sweet mix of herbal wine and honey.

Scythas’ eyes, which had been sightlessly staring head, shivered and refocused. He looked upon the hand that held the cup. Its owner knelt behind him, knelt over him, and as he drank from the cup her right hand offered, he felt her left pry the storm’s wanton fingers from his flesh. One by one, she tore them off and she tore them out, breaking them when they struggled.

“You said you couldn’t help,” he finally choked out when the last of the liquid was gone.

The statue of Urania withdrew the cup and traded it for a crown. The pewter ring of stars settled heavily on his head, cold even through the thick curls of his hair.

“That woman wasn’t worthy of my name.” She sounded more furious than he thought a Muse could be. “She may have worn my face, but I’ll never accept her as Urania. The years between us aren’t enough to justify her behavior. There aren’t enough stars in the sky.”

The stone statue of the maiden drew the carved robes off her shoulders. They flowed like liquid as she wrapped them firm around his battered body, leaving herself naked in the process. Horrified, Scythas tried to press them back.

“That’s too much. You can’t - your body shouldn’t be-”

“It isn’t yet enough.” The statue that he’d stolen from the storm by means of a pewter crown brushed Scythas’ hands away and cinched the stone silks tight around his waist. “Cynic that she is, that woman did more than wrong you with her presence. She even had the gall to reach beyond her station.”

“How?” Scythas whispered, unable to imagine something that existed above the nine. “The Father?” Had she insulted Him, somehow?

“Worse than that. She’s forgotten why it is we call ourselves cultivators. Rather than nurture your journey, she had the audacity to tell you what sort of ending it would have. She tried to stunt your glory.”

The storm raged, and the festering wound inside his heart reared up as the last of its hands were forced off of him. Scythas stared into the eye of the storm. It glared hungrily back.

Some battles couldn’t be won. He’d learned that lesson early on. Some things could only be survived.

[“Your story is one of weathering storms.”]

[“Are you sure of that?”]

“There’s a storm here in your heart,” Urania agreed, cold stone lips brushing past his ear. Scythas shivered. “But who said you had to suffer it? You didn’t just weather the winds that delivered you from the west - you filled that ship’s sails yourself.”

Scythas stared up at the hungry eye. He rose slowly up to one knee. His hands clenched into fists.

His pneuma was against him. His heart wasn’t his own. He needed a weapon, something more than a child’s fists, but it was all lost to the storm-

The moment that he thought it, she buried a pewter scythe in the stone before him. In the reflection of its wicked blade, Scythas saw his brother’s face.

“I’m with you.”

For once, he knew she meant it.