The Young Griffon

“Observe,” I whispered, as I hunted the Huntsman, ”the coward in his natural state.”

Lefteris’ nameless boys crept after me, bolts of forest green cloth wrapped around their heads to hide their distinctive red hair. There was no hiding their eyes, though, wide and intense as they tracked the Heroic Huntsman himself. Their focus was commendable, though their tracking skills left much to be desired.

I smiled as I saw a muscle in the massive hunter’s neck twitch.

“The coward is aware that his way of life is at risk, but he lacks the killer instinct to do anything about it. Instead, he fills his time with menial pursuits, such as hunting lesser existences and devouring them, despite the fact that he can go indefinitely without sustenance.” I continued to narrate for the benefit of my young charges, maintaining a harsh voice that Kyno could undoubtedly hear.

We were out in the wilderness once again, this time north of the sanctuary city of Olympia. Game was plentiful out here, provided one was powerful enough to deal with any virtuous beasts encountered, or fortunate enough to avoid them. At the moment, the Heroic Huntsman was tracking a stag.

“How do you know he’s a coward?” The smaller, more precocious of the two children asked in his own whisper.

“I’ve been observing this particular sea creature for weeks now,” I said, shifting undergrowth silently aside with formless hands of pankration intent. The boys did their best to follow me in step, but the crunch of dead leaves betrayed them. “Notice his stature, larger than any of his peers. Notice his pneuma, firmly within the realm of legends. This is a man capable of changing the world.”

The larger of the two boys edged slightly in front of his brother, placing himself between the younger and our prey when I described the full threat. I smiled faintly and patted his head.

“And so we must ask ourselves,” I continued, “is he happy and content with his life as it stands, or is he too fearful of reprisal to make it so?”

“Maybe he is happy,” the younger of the two proposed. “How do you know he isn’t?”

”A fair question,,” I acknowledged. I started to rise. “Let’s ask him.”

“No!” The older of the two hissed, jumping onto my back and wrenching with everything he had to pull me back down. “You can’t!”

“And why not?” I asked. He did about as much to stop me as a feather down pillow, but I humored him and froze halfway to my feet.

“He’ll tell Theri we were with you,” the younger said urgently, gripping my right arm with both hands and pulling with all his strength. “He can’t know we left the house!”

I considered that. Across the glade, far enough that two boys of such juvenile cultivation would not be able to make out the fine details of a man’s face, I looked and saw Kyno staring back at me from the corner of his eye. And I nodded gravely, sinking back down into a crouch.

“I understand,” I said. “We’ll continue as before.” The young vagabonds slumped to the ground in relief. In the distance, I saw Kyno close his eyes in quiet despair before returning to his hunt.

“If we can’t get the truth from the man himself, how else might we discern it? What are the signs to look for? Rather, what makes a man happy?”

“Power,” the precocious one said immediately. How cute.

“Naturally.”

“Wealth,” put forward the elder. I nodded.

The younger tapped his chin, mismatched eyes narrowing thoughtfully as we progressed through the wilderness. Kyno had found his mark, a great stag with five points on each antler. I watched intently how he moved, the approach he took and why. I noted which way the breeze was blowing, the shadows that he kept to.

This was no beast of virtue that the great hero was hunting. This was only a stag, and so Kyno was going through the motions as much as anything else. He could have done this in moments if he felt a need to flex his pneuma. But that would have defeated the purpose. After all, this was nothing but a way to kill time.

“Women,” the younger brother proposed, and Kyno winced ever so slightly.

Ho?

“Your age can still be counted on two hands,” I said disdainfully, though my gaze didn’t waver from the Heroic Huntsman. How interesting. “What would you do with a woman?”

“I’d make her my concubine,” the younger brother insisted, puffing up in my peripheral vision. “A king needs concubines.”

The older brother lurched towards the younger in alarm, grabbing him around the neck and covering his mouth. Gently, I separated the two of them with pankration hands, tilting the younger boy’s head up when he tried to stare at the ground in abashment.

“And what would you have the concubine do for you, little king?”

The little king hesitated, looking to his brother, but I had a rather firm grip on them both. Finally, he gathered up his courage and answered boldly.

“I would have her pour my drinks and feed me grapes,” he firmly declared.

I very carefully did not laugh. We were hunting, after all.

“What shall I call you, little king?” I asked him. Lefteris hadn’t offered the information the night I came down the mountain, and I hadn’t cared enough to ask. But now I was curious.

The boy answered with a mechanical precision that spoke only to a lie.

“Leo.”

“Impossible,” I said at once.

“What do you mean?” The boy demanded, voice rising precipitously as he began to panic. “That’s my name!” Beside him, suspended in mid air by my pankration hands, his older brother began to thrash and fight.

“It is!” the elder insisted. “I swear it is!”

“My virtuous heart won’t tolerate lies,” I warned them both. “But beyond that, you’ve missed my point. It’s impossible for me to call you that, because that’s my name.”

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They both froze, staring at me in bewilderment.

“I thought your name was Griffon,” the elder brother said.

“It is,” I confirmed.

I was treated to the sight of two children experiencing a grand revelation. The little king leaned forward, pressing aside my pankration hands so he could get up close and whisper, as if that would make the difference in being overheard, “Yours is fake too?”

“The opposite.” I turned to fully face him, settling down to the balls of my feet. My ragged cult attire pooled on the forest floor like blood, my late uncle’s sheathed sword jutting up as it brushed against the dirt. “Both of my names are wholly my own. I’ve simply chosen to discard one for the other.”

“But it’s still fake,” the younger insisted. There was an old pain there, an insecurity that ached when prodded. “Even if you chose it, you’re only choosing it because you can’t use the real one.”

“Is that what your guardian did?” I asked, not unkindly. The little king shut his mouth, falling silent. I allowed his brother to fight his way free of my pankration hands, looming protectively over the young king's shoulder. I addressed him next, “And what shall I call you, little sentinel?”

“Pyr.”

The lion and the flame. “Tell me something. How long have the two of you labored under false names?” I asked. Above us, nestled in the prickling leaves of the firs that abounded north of the Half-Step City, an eagle let fly a warning cry.

I turned abruptly, thirty hands of pankration intent manifesting with the Rosy Light of Dawn blazing in their palms.

A crocodile large enough to coat a man like a mantle lunged out of the undergrowth, and in its yawning maw an utterly unnatural number of wicked teeth glistened. It crossed the distance between us in the time it took me to turn, before the boys even had time to scream. Then thirty hands of my violent intent slammed down, driving its hundreds of teeth together.

If the beast’s presence here in the winter woods wasn’t proof enough of its unnatural origins, the teeth certainly were. This was a virtuous beast, sure as the sun rose, and it had the strength and speed to match a hundred of its mundane brethren. Unfortunately for the majestic creature, a crocodile was still a crocodile. Once the maw was closed, it was all too easy to keep it shut.

And I wasn’t afraid to wrestle a lizard.

“Observe,” I said, and tackled the crocodile bodily back into the brush.

“We’ve established what makes a happy man!” I exclaimed, wrenching an arm around the reptile’s tree trunk neck and heaving back, thirty pankration hands making certain that it couldn’t open its jaws. The beast rolled, eerily silent for the frenzied nature of its movement. I locked both legs around its midsection, and with my free hand coated in the Light of Dawn began hammering punches into its side.

“Power!” Slam

“Wealth!” Slam

“Concubines, to feed us grapes!” Crack. The massive creature whipped itself and me both almost in a full circle as I finally broke one of its ribs. It exhaled a deep, rumbling noise of pain that made the leaves shiver on their branches. I punched it again in the same spot, and it rolled us right through a mighty fir’s trunk.

“But you forgot pride!” I latched on to the crocodiles straining maw with both flesh hands, withdrawing my pankration arms and turning them upon the falling fir instead. The tree instantly caught flame where the hands of my intent touched, and they set to tearing it apart as it fell.

“Even a coward has his pride, misguided as it may be,” I explained for the benefit of the little king and his faithful sentinel. I saw a flash of wide mismatched eyes and the older pulling the younger insistently back before the fat lizard rolled us again. “Even a coward has his ego!”

The hands of my pankration intent lashed down with sticks and clubs of burning fir wood, hammering into the crocodile from every angle. With a snarl of effort and a twist of my hips, I flipped us once more. My back to the ground and the crocodile’s belly to the sky. My violent intent struck its vulnerable underside without mercy, and I relished in its rumbling cries.

And then I was pleasantly surprised. I heard a child’s sharp cry, felt a lowly Civic cultivator rush into the eddies of my influence, and the little king came lunging through the undergrowth, wild-eyed and with a wood-cutter’s axe in both hands. He leapt through the seething mass of my flaming pankration hands and leveraged every ounce of his strength to bring his axe down on the crocodile’s exposed stomach.

The cutter’s axe shattered. Of course, even the frailest of such a creature’s scales were more than a match for an axe of humble iron.

The little king bared his teeth and balled his fists, hammering punches into the beast’s stomach instead. I grinned. A moment later, the sentinel burst through the brush, pneuma flaring in absolute panic, and did not hesitate upon seeing the situation. The elder threw himself bodily on the crocodile’s snapping maw and drove both thumbs into its eyes.

The beast’s pneuma rippled and burst. The certainty of death enveloped all three of us in that moment. The knowledge that we had already been hunted, that we were already sitting in the predator’s mouth. I felt the crocodile bite down on my very soul.

I threw my head back and laughed.

“Good! Good! Fight like you mean it! Fight like this is real, because it is! A man dies a thousand deaths if he lets a thousand insults go - power, wealth, and women can be gained and lost and gained again. A man’s pride is the only resource he can’t win back! Guard it with your life, because it is your life! Wealth is transient, power is relative -”

The Heroic Huntsman hurtled down from the heights of the fir tree forest, cratering the ground and throwing all of us three feet into the air. The boys grunted, landing sloppily, and stared petrified at the stone-faced hero.

I craned my head to meet Kyno’s eyes and smiled brightly, laying one last fist into his crocodile’s wounded side.

“Pride,” I promised him, “is absolute.”

Kyno‘s lip lifted from his teeth. The hulking cultivator gestured sharply with his right hand, the left currently holding a ten point stag by the scruff of its neck like an unruly dog. I let go of the crocodile and watched with some amusement as it rushed to him, surging up his legs and somehow turning from a living, breathing predator back to an empty skin the instant it came to rest over his head.

“You’re too loud,” the Heroic Huntsman rumbled. “You’re scaring all the game.”

“What makes a man happy, Kyno?” I prompted him, propping my head up on one hand in lieu of standing.

He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“He was right,” the little king whispered to his sentinel.

“My mentor always told me that his greatest happiness in his life was teaching me,” I said meaningfully. It was true. Old Chersis, the man who had shouldered the primary burden of my formal education within the Rosy Dawn, had said those very words countless times. Whether or not his tone had been entirely genuine when he said them, I couldn’t say.

“I highly doubt that,” Kyno said, likely thinking of my surly Roman brother.

“It’s worth trying,” I said encouragingly, and came to my feet, brushing off my ragged cult attire. I could already feel several deep bruises forming where the crocodile had rolled me into particularly unforgiving surfaces, but it was a pleasant sort of pain. “I’ll admit, my grasp of field craft isn’t what it could be. And I’m sure these boys would love to learn from a legendary hero. Isn’t that right?”

The little king nodded firmly, leaving his sentinel no choice but to follow suit.

Kyno considered the two of them. Dark eyes swiveled to me, and the crocodile’s ancient predation shone in their depths. I stepped forward, into the open maw, and offered my hand.

You’ve lost some pride, I spoke in the voice of my soul, so the Civic boys wouldn’t hear. Are you going to watch the rest slip away from you too?

For reasons that I didn’t know, but intended to find out, the heroes of this place had been broken down. Rendered less than what they should be. But that did not mean they had lost all of what they were. They were still men and women worth telling stories of. They were still

beloved by the Muses, and reviled by the Fates.

And this one, looming over me in a winter glade with blood dripping from his hands, was still a fearsome predator.

“Teach me how to hunt,” I bade the Heroic Huntsman.

He huffed a breath and clasped my hand in his.