The Young Griffon

It had to be said. For all of my accolades and for all of my majesty, for all that I was the only man that could ever be me, I was not perfect. I had my failings. And even more egregious than that, I was not all-knowing. In some respects, I was not even particularly well-informed.

My father had always done things in his own time, and the Scarlet City had regulated its pace to match his. For all that I was myself, I was no different in that regard. I cultivated the virtue that he forced upon me, I excelled in the tasks that he set before me, and I learned the lessons that he saw fit to teach me. And only those lessons.

I sought out what I could, whenever I could, of course. But if Damon Aetos didn’t want you to know something, there wasn’t a single soul in Alikos who would dare to speak of it. If there was something he didn’t want you to have, all the gold in Egypt couldn’t convince an Alikoan to sell it to you.

I’d always known that my father was keeping things from me. But I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of it until I’d stepped foot into the sanctuary city.

The Crows were each of the Sophic Realm, which meant that whichever faction sent them hadn’t been pointed our way by our new friends. Otherwise, they would have sent Heroes. In the kyrios’ absence, the Raging Heaven had abandoned all but the most surface level pretenses of unity. The various factions of the free Mediterranean had only just begun to pick each other apart trying to fill the chasm left behind, and division was the name of the game.

Sol and I had implicated ourselves by associating with not one, but six Heroic cultivators in full view of various indigo initiates. This had been inevitable.

Tirelessly, the Crow on the left promised in the voice of his soul.

Forever at hand, the Crow on the right declared with unwavering resolve.

I saw the confusion in Sol’s eyes, soon overtaken by the storm. Gravitas rocked the temple, an inaudible boom that made my teeth vibrate and pounded the Crow on the right back into the olive oil pool. Sol lunged forward to trade blows with the Crow on the left, but the cultivator in black deftly avoided him, ducking and pivoting on one foot and laying a vicious kick into his right shin.

It didn’t sweep Sol’s legs out from under him like the Crow had intended, but the Roman grunted and staggered sideways, pointing a damning finger at the scavenger. Torchlight shadow flickered around him and he blurred left, faster than any Sophic cultivator could possibly move.

He avoided the invocation of Sol’s virtue and caught my clenched fist with his gut. I savored the sweet sound of a man choking on air, hammering into him from every angle with pankration hands wreathed in the rosy light of dawn.

[The dawn breaks.]

Without pause, spoke the Crow, slamming his forehead into mine. Starlight exploded in my eyes and my ears rang, the force of the blow unlike anything I had experienced from a Philosopher before. I bared my teeth in a grin and caught his hands as they lashed up.

A thin line of blood trickled down from the point where his hooded forehead met mine, as the sounds of splashing and savage struggle sounded from the olive oil pool that served as the foundation for the chryselephantine throne. The Crow had no heart flames to illuminate his eyes behind his hood, but I stared deeply into them anyway.

“So this is a man of principle,” I mused, gripping his hood and the tattered edges of his midnight robes with the hands of my intent, ripping and tearing. His pneuma flared.

And he spoke. “Sacrilege,” the Crow intoned, “to fight in the temple of the Father.” And just as before, when those young Philosophers had stated their facts, the strength of his soul re-doubled.

I abandoned the effort of unmasking him as the pressure on our joined hands became unbearable. Pankration hands chopped viciously down on his forearms, forcing him to release me. I leapt back across the tiles.

Three boys, and now this. Not a coincidence - this was something fundamental. Something I should know.

“Starting a fight is far worse than ending it,” I replied, putting the weight of my pneuma behind it. I felt a hint of something, some weightlessness, but I was only imitating what I’d observed as an outsider. I concentrated, while Sol jumped straight up to the ceiling in a spray of olive oil, the Crow on the right in close pursuit.

My opponent turned to flickering shadows again, but he’d already shown me the trick of it the first time. He braced himself first, taking the stance that he would emerge from the technique in. Chambering a right hook from fifty feet away.

I leaned right, dodging it by a hair, and drove a knee up between his legs. As I did it, I condemned him.

“Ambushing your cult’s own honored guests,” I denounced him, striking him twice in the kidney and five times across the face. “On your city’s own holy ground!” The Crow lurched back, shadows flickering as he attempted to escape me. I grabbed him with flaming hands and reeled him back in. “Among heaven and earth, you alone are the dishonored one!”

And I felt it. A power that stirred above my eyes, pulsing through my skull and coursing down, down, ripping through me like an entire jug of kykeon and filling me with vital strength.

The Crow stomped my bare foot and lowered his shoulder into my chest, charging. Lightning threads of pain shot through my foot, and my cultivation faltered as he knocked the wind out of me. He was my superior in cultivation, but that had been the case before with the children. But this cultivator was a grown man - his body had weathered years of intense conditioning. The strength of his body matched that of his soul.

And then, the strength of his reason superseded mine as he lifted my feet from the floor and snarled.

“Fool. I am no one.”

The inexplicable head rush left me as quickly as it had come, an ice bath that shocked the senses and stole the strength from my limbs. It almost killed me as the Crow took us to the ground, producing a hideous rusted dagger from a fold in his robes and stabbing it at my side. But even while my mind wavered, my intent remained true. Pankration hands caught the blade and knocked it from his hand, even as its rusted edge cut into my soul.

I spat blood onto his black veil and swung my legs up, hooking them around his chest and twisting at the waist while we fell to the tiles. The assassin’s blade clattered to the hallowed marble floor, the sound of it all wrong as it skittered and spun across the tiles. The Crow lurched for it, kicking viciously at me, but it was too late. I had him.

The Crow on the right flared his influence, crying out in that soundless voice, and Sol responded in kind with a tidal wave of gravity that caught everyone within the temple. Myself included. My stomach flipped and my heart flew up into my throat as the entire world shifted onto a different axis, and I flew sideways as if I was falling out of the sky. Somewhere up above, Sorea shrieked and the Crow cried out in his real voice.

A marble sentinel stood in the shadow of an archway, kneeling in deference as it faced the father. There were eleven others in the temple, each carrying a weapon and all of them without a face. This one had a trident in hand, brandished invitingly as we approached it. The Crow thrashed against my hold as our bodies lifted off the ground entirely, hammering into me with clenched fists and vile shadow techniques that burnt away at the touch of the rosy fingers.

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I planted an open palm flat against the Crow’s hooded face and shoved it sideways, twisting him around with the leverage of my leg lock as I did. The statued sentinel may have been nothing more than stone, but its trident was purest bronze. I slammed the Crow into it, and all three points of the trident erupted out of his chest.

I pulled myself to the ground with pankration hands and turned, catching the second Crow as Sol’s attack sent him flying my way. He immediately went wild, fighting me like a rat caught by its tail. Which, in the end, wasn’t far from the truth.

“You’re no one, are you?” I grunted, planting my feet and ignoring his impotent elbows and kicks as I heaved him over my shoulder. The head rush returned, blooming inside my skull and coursing through my limbs as I invoked what could only be the primary weapon of every warrior scholar.

“As if I could ever lose to such a coward. My tribulation has a face.”

Their rhetoric.

I slammed the Crow to the floor and stepped back as Sol plummeted from the tip of the Father’s ivory spear and stomped the poor bastard through the scarlet tiles. An invocation of Gravitas at the moment of impact caved the scavenger’s chest in entirely. The sound of it was horrific. The noise the man made as he arched up was even more so. I caught his face with pankration hands and drove it back down, smothering him until he went limp.

The Philosopher died and his last, gagging breath exploded through the temple. One last gasp, raging through the temple of the Father and extinguishing every torch in sight.

Ensconced in sudden darkness, the true crow nearly got away.

Sorea swept down with a triumphant cry and sank its talons into an avian mass of liquid shadow as it attempted to flee. Just as before, the manifestation of anonymity wailed horribly as it was consumed by the Roman messenger eagle bit by bit.

“What was that?” Sol asked gutturally. His indigo attire, pristine just a few moments ago, was now drenched in olive oil and torn at his stomach and his right thigh where the crow had cut him. Poisoned again, no doubt, though he was breathing steadily for now.

“Hard to tell,” I said sarcastically, swiping blood from my bare chest. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it was my point being proven.”

Sol scowled, running a hand through oil-slick black hair. “Not that. What were they saying? And how were they saying it?”

“Ho, the great Legate doesn’t know? I was going to ask you, master,” I said mockingly. A wave of his influence hit me, the riptide pull urging me off balance. I set my stance and braced with pneuma hands, spitting blood at his feet in response.

“Just tell me,” he snapped. “I’m sick and tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

“That makes two of us.” In the dark, with little but the wet sounds of a virtuous beast gorging itself and a Sophic cultivator struggling to force breath through punctured lungs, Sol and I took the measure of one another.

I snapped my fingers and lit the scrambled torches of the holy temple with the rosy fingers of dawn, righting any that had fallen. Sol seemed utterly unsurprised to see me grinning.

“I suppose it’s my turn to be the master again, since your worthless mentor taught you so little of our ways.”

“He taught me as much as he could,” Sol said, defending the man without hesitation. “It isn’t any fault of his that our time was cut short.”

“I’m sure,” I said agreeably. Then, with the voice of my soul, I rendered judgement. “But he still left you unprepared. He neglected your foundations, and now you’re here, lost and without understanding. He failed.”

Crouched over the broken corpse of a mangled Crow, bearing his teeth up at me in naked threat, I could see the wolf in him. I smirked, savoring the head rush of my rhetoric hitting home, and spoke to him again without moving my lips.

Snarl all you want. You know I never lie.

“We are men of principle,” I told my Roman brother. “Philosophers seeking wisdom and ultimate enlightenment. More than that, we strive to educate those around us in the same way that we have been educated ourselves. Would you say that your mentor was a wise man? A worldly, well-informed man?” Sol nodded grudgingly. I splayed my hands. “And thus, he failed you as a Philosopher, because he only passed on a fraction of those things to you.

“We understand the world around us as Philosophers - the rules of nature. But how can we impress that understanding upon others? How may we convince them that they may see?”

“Rhetoric,” Sol realized.

I hummed in approval. “The principles we live by are a power all their own.” Our ability to fight our baser instincts and our heart’s desires in pursuit of a more perfect existence, that was where reason triumphed over spirit and hunger. That was where a Philosopher truly shined. Rhetoric, then, was our ability to impose the rules of nature as we understood them onto others.

There was incredible power in living a principled life. There was even more incredible power in understanding the world, and in passing that understanding on to others. I internalized these concepts, slotting them into gaps that my father had intentionally left in my education. They fit seamlessly together.

“Why didn’t the Heroes do this?” Sol wondered, troubled. He stood and began wringing what oil he could from his robes.

“I don’t know,” I admitted freely. “But I have a few ideas.”

“And you said my mentor was a failure. You had a Tyrant for a father, and you’re still not sure? What sort of father keeps his son in the dark?”

“What sort of father drags his son to war?” I returned. A tense moment came and went.

“My father wanted the best for me,” Sol said with utter conviction.

“So did mine.”

Sol grimaced, shaking olive oil from his hair and looking at the corpse at our feet. “I still don’t like this. I’d rather leave Olympia, go elsewhere.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said, kneeling beside the dead Crow and laying my hands across his body, all twenty-two of them. “Our hands are bloodied now. Are you really fine with leaving things as they are? Leaving the Raging Heaven to consume itself, and allowing our friends to suffer?”

His right hand clenched into a fist, and I knew I had won. “Don’t act like you’re doing this for them. You came here looking for a thrill and you’ve found it. It’s for you, not for them.”

“Wrong,” I said. “It’s both.” I closed my eyes and said a short, silent prayer for the departed man. Then I started stripping him. “Tell me, Sol. Did you find your mentor?”

He shook his head.

“Did you find any leads?” I asked, considering the face of the dead man as the hood pulled free. I didn’t know him. Sol remained silent, which was answer enough. “Let me guess. You confided in Anastasia and she recognized his name. But she didn’t give you anything concrete.”

He grunted.

“You know what sort of existence a Heroic cultivator is, Sol. You’ve heard the tales. If your war stories are more than just dust and wind, then you’ve even seen it for yourself.”

“Get to the point.”

I scoffed, but obliged him. “You know as well as I do that a Hero’s full strength can’t be contained by a city, even if that city is Olympia. It doesn’t fit down alleyways and corridors. It doesn’t thrive in friendly spars and controlled competitions. My cousin Nikolas had plans to compete in the Olympic Games this year, did you know that? His companions, too. Yet they didn’t wear indigo when they came back home, and he never once spoke of the Raging Heaven when he was telling his stories. Why do you think that is?”

“Because he never joined,” Sol said, frowning thoughtfully.

“Exactly.” I unwrapped the black robes from the dead Philosopher and stood, moving over to the olive oil pool and dunking them in, scouring the blood from the cloth with pankration hands. “Almost all of the athletes that compete in the Games do so as outsiders. The mystery cults can not possibly hope to provide for a Hero seeking advancement. It simply isn’t possible.”

“Even with Tyrants there to mentor them?” Sol asked.

“Cultivators are greedy existences, you know this,” I said, shrugging. “There’s only one type of man that a Tyrant will mentor.”

His heir.

Something slid into Sol’s bearing, some nameless steel, and he crossed over to the Crow skewered on the sentinel’s trident. I didn’t see what happened, focusing on my scrubbing, but I felt the pulse of his will and heard the crunch of a man’s skull caving in. My pankration hands cupped the torches protectively as the Philosopher’s last gasp ripped through the temple. There was a pause and then a brief shuffling of cloth, and Sol appeared at my side, dunking his own set of black rags into the olive oil.

“A Hero can’t advance in a cage,” he said quietly, his eyes distant while he worked. Reliving a thousand different memories. “So why are they here?”

“That’s the question,” I confirmed, pulling my new robes from the pool and cracking them like a whip, spraying spirit oil across the Father’s feet. “A Hero can’t be anything less than a significant existence. What could have led them here? What could possibly be worth their time within these walls?”

What could they be running from?

We worked in silence for a few moments, Sol scrubbing while I dried my robes with smoldering palms.

Belatedly, I added, “Also, I want to see the Oracles.”

Sol looked at me incredulously. “Oracles? One wasn’t enough?”

“Who do you think I am?”

The Roman shook his head in disgust and pulled his own robes from the pool, passing them to me when I offered a flaming hand. “How do you plan to blend in? We don’t know who these two answered to. We don’t have any idea how they all communicate with one another. We’ll be rooted out within a day.”

“Use that head of yours, Legate.” I waved a hand at the virtuous beast perched on a high arch, observing us with curiosity. “They’re called Crows for a reason.”

Sol’s eyes narrowed. “Sorea. To me.” The eagle let fly an obliging cry and swept down from the arches, landing gently on the Roman’s outstretched arm. Mongrel bird. The cuts it had given me still stung.

The Roman brandished his open palm and said firmly, “Spit it out.”

Sorea cocked its head, and then its body heaved. The great messenger eagle vomited a pile of ink-black bones into Sol’s hand. Enough for two small birds.

My nose wrinkled. “Well. That’s unfortunate.”