The Son of Rome

“That went differently in your head, didn’t it,” I said, eyeing the ink-black pile of bones and bile that Sorea had vomited into my open palm. They were warm, warmer than they should have been. Scorching hot, even by a cultivator’s standards.

“You just ate it,” Griffon said, addressing my bird with incredulous disgust. “How did you digest the second one that fast?”

My eyes rolled. “It isn’t a real crow. We have no idea what its flesh is even made of.”

“Pneuma, obviously.” He stalked over to the corpse of the assassin he’d impaled on the stone sentinel’s trident. He didn’t hesitate to desecrate it, jostling the dead man from the restful position I’d settled him in and twisting his head to and fro. He gripped his jaw and looked into his slack mouth, then the narrow passages of his nostrils and ears.

It occurred to me that this may have been the first life the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn had ever taken.

“There wasn’t another crow in his robe?” he asked. At my negative response, he slammed a palm to the hollowed stone beside the corpse’s face and pushed himself to his feet. He turned to pace across the tiles.

“What is a Crow without his wings?” Griffon murmured, nearly to himself, frowning ferociously. He spat. “No one.”

“They may have only sent one for the pair of them,” I offered. Scarlet eyes turned balefully my way. “

“Tell me then, master. How many Crows did you come across without their wings on the night of the kyrios’ funeral?”

I frowned, considering the pile of scalding hot cartilage in my palm. My memories were largely a blur, but the cadence was always clear. The steady rhythm of the legions marched a vivid path through otherwise muddled memories. I followed that path, soundlessly mouthing the words, and in those crystalline moments I remembered the Crows.

I remembered the way they’d crumpled. The way they’d skulked, the way they’d scattered, the way they’d screamed. Never in my life had I come close to the alabaster heights of what the Greeks called the Heroic Realm - but then, it hadn’t mattered much that night. I’d led weaker men against greater enemies than them. With Anastasia, Scythas, and Jason at my side, they hadn’t stood a chance.

I remembered how they’d fallen. And I remembered the sounds of beating wings in the shadows as they fled.

“Sorea,” I said. The messenger eagle flexed its great talons around my forearm, just enough to acknowledge me. “Did you notice another?” Virtuous beast or not, it was still only a bird. Yet the look Sorea gave me in response to that question was utterly unmistakeable. “That’s a no.”

“Bastard must have sent it off when I arrived.” Griffon reclaimed his stolen rags and ran flaming hands up and down them, grimacing at the trio of gaping trident holes in the cloth. “Sol, trade me.”

“Not a chance,” I said without hesitation, dumping the ink-black crow bones on the lip of the olive oil pool and brushing Sorea off my arm. He edged towards the bones, beak snapping softly. “Leave them.” The bird shrieked indignantly but obeyed, taking flight out of the temple and vanishing into the night.

I wrung out the robes of a dead man, watching what moisture remained fall into the pool, drop by drop. I contemplated Griffon’s reflection, the darkness of his expression as he turned his set of midnight attire over in his hands.

“You’ve never killed a man before,” I said without judgement. For a moment, his eyes flickered.

“Wrong.”

Lies built upon truth. “You’ve never killed a man before today,” I clarified. His silence spoke for him. “It shakes you. I know.” Frozen moments, memories of all the men I’d stood shoulder to shoulder with when they took their first life. All the men I’d commanded to bloody their unsullied hands.

In the pursuit of a higher ideal, the men of Rome could bear that burden without regret. With the hand of Gaius guiding them, legionnaires struck down the enemies of the Republic without fear of the heavens above. But even so, and even then, that blood could drown you as surely as the sea. Salt and ash.

I considered the reflection of my only true companion in this barbarous world, and wondered how many dead men it would take to drown him.

“It isn’t weakness to regret-”

“I don’t.”

My hands clenched around the twist of black cloth, wringing a trickle of olive oil from it that struck the pool and distorted his reflection with ripples. I looked at him. His face matched his words. There was no regret in the set of his jaw, no grief in those narrowed eyes. Stripped of his usual good humor, what remained was the same foundation that had always been there. What I’d recognized the day I met him.

“From the moment I was born, I’ve known the worth of my soul.” The words were matter-of-fact. Without doubt. “My life is mine. If someone tries to take it, I won’t hesitate to take theirs first. I have nothing to regret.”

I didn’t argue. I knew the truth when I saw it.

“Mad Greek,” I said ruefully. He smirked faintly and belted the mangled black robe around his waist, obscuring his Rosy Dawn attire and golden tunic turned makeshift satchel.

“You still want to do this?” I knew the answer already. I shrugged the dead man’s disguise over my indigo robes. What had been a voluminous fit on the would-be assassin was just tight enough that I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable fighting in it, so I didn’t bother wearing it as it was intended. As a cloak, it would do.

The seemingly mundane material blurred at the edges of my perceptions, fading into the shadows around us like a lash of paint across canvas. Growing thinner and blending together. Like I was a piece of this place as much as anything else. As I wrapped the layers around my body, I felt my own sense of self, the sensation of my own vital breath’s circulation, fading into anonymity.

It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was closer to those iron manacles that it should have been.

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“Of course,” Griffon said, pulling me from my thoughts. He had the crow’s hood over his head now, obscuring his most striking features. He’d even done something to his hair while I wasn’t looking, preventing it from spilling down to his shoulders in its usual way. “You noticed it too, didn’t you?”

“The cloth conceals,” I said, and as the sheer black hood fell over my face, thin enough to see through without issue, my voice changed as well. Not enough to belong to someone else. Just enough to not belong to me.

“What is a mask if not a tool of anonymity?” Griffin mused, leaning over the rim of the pool to consider himself.

I noticed a somewhat glaring flaw in his disguise.

“Worthless, when you’re still half naked.” Oddly enough, it was more pleasing than unsettling to hear a stranger's voice render judgment on his stupidity in place of my own. For a moment, it was as if I wasn’t the only sane person left in this world.

Griffin shrugged, unconcerned. “You wouldn’t trade me, and I refuse to wear a tunic riddled with holes.”

“Anyone from the funeral will recognize you immediately.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said lightly, gathering up crow bones in his cupped palms and dipping them into the pool. A stranger's pneuma, utterly divorced from Griffon’s and yet his nonetheless, permeated through the pool and the bones in particular, wearing away at them the same way he had worn away a chunk of marble an eternity ago at the Rosy Dawn’s initiation trials.

Ink-black flecks of bone whirled and dispersed in the olive oil, turning the pool black. Forming storm clouds beneath the chryselephantine king’s feet. Pankration hands that felt like nothing I had ever encountered before but could be nothing other than Griffon’s own violent intent dipped into the pool one by one, cupping ink-black olive oil in ethereal palms.

I watched twenty hands trace across Griffon's bare torso, along his shoulders and around his back. The lines they drew were seemingly random, whirling loops around his arms and jagged lines up and down the musculature of his chest. It was only once they’d drawn back as one, clapping against one another in apparent satisfaction, that I beheld the full picture.

He looked like a completely different man. It was the ink as much as the cloth. Black olive oil tattoos, painted with shocking precision. He hadn’t just obscured the distinct lines of muscle that any of our companions could have identified in an instant. He’d framed them, traced them, and in the smallest of margins, he’d brushed outside of those lines. Not enough to alert a casual eye. Just enough to suggest a slightly different definition. Focusing on any one detail, there wasn’t much. But as a whole, the insertion of his muscles looked completely different.

I couldn’t see his face behind the hood, but the silent spreading of his hands was clear enough expectation. I grunted, and that was answer enough for him. He chuckled and swaggered over to the outer perimeter of the hollowed temple, towards the statue sentinels that waited in the archways.

“We’re still blind,” I reminded him. He plucked a true bronze spear from the marble hands that held it, weighing it consideringly before shrugging and tossing it over his shoulder at me. I caught the surprisingly heavy weapon and spun it in my right hand. It was a good weapon. The best I’d held in over a year.

“So we’ll gather information. By force, if necessary. Though I can’t imagine anyone being shy to confide in you.” He plucked a gleaming bow and a winged arrow from another faceless sentinel, held it for about a heartbeat, and then dropped it to the ground and moved on. It clattered deafeningly against the holy stone. The fine hairs on the back of my neck rose.

“This feels like the wrong approach.”

Griffin took a broad axe from clenched marble fists and tossed it from hand to hand to pankration hand, nodding in satisfaction.

“Careful brother,” he said idly. “There’s a fine line between caution and cowardice.”

“What about audacity and insanity?” I returned, unbothered. The torch light caught a pattern in the haft of the spear as I spun it, shimmering trails of textured bronze that differed just enough to be aesthetic. “You know precious little about the storm brewing here, and I know even less. And you’re suggesting we dive into it headfirst.”

“Why are you here, Sol?” Griffin asked, contemplating the featureless face of the looming sentinel.

“To find my mentor.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” I said, annoyed.

“All for power? All to kill the dogs?” He turned away from the statue, bereft of its axe. He lifted the hooded veil from his face and skewered me with a look. “You think the easy path will lead you there?”

My eyes narrowed.

“You’re worried that you won’t survive the conquerors path,” Griffon said. With a certainty that made my lip twitch up from my teeth. He advanced with that gleaming bronze axe in hand. “You’re worried that the scholar's path will take too long. And you’ve convinced yourself that the champion’s path is nothing but flash and thunder. You worry that you don’t deserve to want it.”

He stopped just outside the range of the spear he’d tossed me. One of his pankration hands reached across that distance and lifted the hood from my face. He smiled a sharp challenge.

“Allow your brother to cleanse your heart of worries. I’ll do it in your place.”

I sneered fully. His smile only grew.

“I’ll take the foolish risks,” he promised me. “I’ll walk the treacherous roads and suffer the trails untread. When the dogs come barking, I’ll scour them from this earth in your name.”

My sneer turned to a snarl. The hands of our influence slammed together in a deadlock struggle. Beneath the anonymous shroud of the crow’s shadow, we strained against ideals in place of each other.

“I’ll return the city of Rome to you,” Griffon continued, and the fact that every word of it was his true intention only made me more furious. “I’ll fight all the battles that you can’t.”

“What are you doing?” I asked him through grit teeth.

“Something different.” He advanced a step further, within the range of my spear. I stepped forward to meet him, into the range of his axe. In the low light of the vandalized temple, the father’s shadow loomed over us both in ivory judgment.

“Does it anger you?” he whispered softly. “The thought of someone else making right what your enemies made wrong? If Rome is all that’s in your heart, it shouldn’t. If your only wish is to see the dogs of Carthage wiped out, then this should be nothing but a relief.”

Whatever he saw in my eyes, he seemed to like it. He continued, with that terrible satisfaction.

“You may doubt yourself, but you wouldn’t dare doubt me. I swear that I’ll do it. I absolve you of this burden. So if that’s the only reason you’re still here, if that’s the only reason you’re still alive while all of your men are dead, then go join them without regrets. Be free. And I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Enough. Be silent.”

“I refuse.” Scarlet eyes danced. “You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. You’ll never be satisfied with a victory you didn’t seize with your own two hands. You’ll never be able to rest until you tear those animals apart and eat their beating hearts.

“Your virtuous heart won’t accept this world until you take it from them.”

Gravitas rocked the father’s temple, three thousand dead men pressing down on my shoulders, the weight of command far too heavy to bear. Always, forever too heavy. What else could I do but bear it?

“If I don’t,” I whispered, “Who will?”

Griffin smiled brilliantly, standing unshaken while eleven stone sentinels crumbled beneath the captain’s virtue. He surveyed the blasphemous destruction with a keen eye. Pankration hands swept across the hallowed grounds and gathered up the bronze weapons left behind.

“We’ll have to find a place to keep these,” he decided, surveying each in turn. “Leaving all but two behind would be far too obvious. And who knows? We may yet convince our fellow sophists to join us in our humble little adventure. In fact-”

He paused at the sound of bones snapping. Blinked and stared at the fragment of ink black bone I held out to him. A deep, vibrant red light burned blindingly at the center of the shard.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, with something like glee.

“We’re blind without wings,” I said, dropping the broken bone. A pankration hand caught it as it fell. “If we can’t make use of these scavengers in life, the least they can do is serve us in death.”

“Seems dangerous,” Griffin said. He raised an eyebrow. “Twelves to see who goes first?”

Danger. Risk. Certain, inescapable death. Perhaps Griffin was right. It was time to stop pretending that it was dread that made my heart pound in this city of monstrous barbarians, and not anticipation.

A captain leads from the front, I told him in the voice of my soul, and sucked the starlight marrow from the bone.