The Son of Rome

Jason fell to one knee, staring down at the mess I’d made of Selene’s floor. For her part, the Scarlet Oracle only slapped me lightly on the shoulder for the damage I’d done and rolled her eyes when I mouthed an apology.

“Solus,” Jason said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I - there’s no excuse for my cowardice. Nothing I can say-”

“What cowardice?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, his eyes still wide. The ocean-blue flames behind them were almost fully eclipsed by his pupils.

“What?”

“They can’t read our minds,” Scythas said tiredly, slumped against the wall across from us. “Even if it feels like it at times. You have to be more specific.”

“Are you apologizing,” I asked, “For creeping in under Scythas’ cloak like a stray? Or are you apologizing for staying under it, out of sight, while we spoke to him? For observing us when you knew you could not be observed in kind?”

“I wasn’t apologizing for any of those things,” he admitted, forcing the words out. “But I should have been, and now I am. I should have done this first, before anything else was said here. I'm sorry for that too.” When he clenched his teeth together as if in physical pain, I noticed his right canine was subtly different from the rest. Not a natural tooth at all, but a carved fang of pure white-gold.

I let him work through it alone. Every officer in the legions, from the lowest Tribune to the highest Legate, knew that silence and guilt would draw the words out of a soldier faster than anything an officer could do. You only had to be there, deafeningly loud in your silence, and wait for them to break themselves.

Admittedly, the sight of me sitting on a sixteen year old girl’s lovingly adorned couch while she massaged my shoulders likely took something from the captain’s glare. Fortunately, Jason had risked the ire of every Tyrant on this mountain to sneak down here with Scythas, all so he could confess. It didn’t take much.

“For before,” he said. “For the Gadfly.”

I waited patiently.

“What about the Gadfly?” Selene’s prompted him, not unkindly. The captain of the Alabaster Isles exhaled shakily.

“For not stepping in to help when he grabbed you,” Jason elaborated, striking the knuckles of his left fist against the floor. Every amethyst vein embedded in the marble flashed, for a moment illuminating all four corners of the room. “I should have done something. Not even a full day before, I promised that I would stand by your side, and I did nothing.

“While the Gadfly was on you, I did nothing. While Griffon was heaving himself into danger, I did nothing!” He gripped his head with the other hand, striking the floor again. He seethed. “Against the Scholar himself, shackled to a Philosopher’s strength, Griffon still acted without hesitation. When the Gadfly took you to the mountain, he sprinted after you like Cerberus itself was on his heels!

“And I did NOTHING!”

The flames in Jason‘s eyes blazed like bonfires, spilling out from the confines of his irises. His heroic pneuma roared through the room. Rage and self-loathing overcame control, and I was treated to a glimpse of the pirate’s true strength.

The lights in the room, torches and a lit brazier in the corner, dimmed and faded to bare pinpricks of light. The sound of Scythas cursing and coming to his feet was lost to my ears entirely, registering instead as faint vibrations on my skin. And I watched, with the eyes of my Sophic sense, as his furious influence reached out and crushed a beautifully chiseled bust of a woman’s head to rubble.

I felt more than heard Selene cry out behind me as the bust was crushed. I saw Jason‘s influence lash out again in the time it took my heart to beat once, saw a codex filled with sheets of fine gold in place of papyrus jerk as it was seized by his influence. I saw the bundle of leather and gold cave in on itself a dozen times in a fraction of a second.

Before my heart could beat a second time, hazel-gold light in front of me and scarlet light behind me cut through the darkness. Scythas dove across the room and Selene vaulted over the lounging couch, both of their Heroic souls flaring blindingly bright.

Still, my heart would beat a second time before either of them reached Jason. By then, the strand of the pirate’s influence reaching for me would have found its mark. Two beats and never again.

In that space between the first beat and the second, as a Hero and an Oracle reached out desperately, and as the dread pirate began to rear back in horrified understanding of what he’d done, I finally recognized what it was his influence was doing. An effect I’d only ever heard of secondhand, from my father.

When Gaius was a young man, just twenty-five years old, he was captured by pirates in the Adriatic. This was before he became the man we know him as today, before he was the general of the west. But that man was within him even then. So when the pirates set a young patrician’s ransom for him rather than a general’s, Gaius demanded they raise their price - even went so far as to promise them that he’d see it paid.

While they laughed and obliged him, he promised them another thing too. That he would return some day with a legion at his back, and he would crucify every single one of them for their crimes.

They hardly believed him, of course. But the general of the west always makes good on his promises, doesn’t he? Gaius returned with his legion, just as he promised, and he nailed each and every one of those pirates to a cross.

Ordinarily, there are men within the ranks tasked with concluding a crucifixion. Some use knives, others use swords or barbed whips. The proper way is a spear, I’ve already told you that. One thrust through the heart and justice is rendered. Most days, Gaius is of a similar mind. But these pirates were guilty of crimes of a different magnitude, against more men than Gaius alone. The entire Republic had suffered the burden of their presence in the Adriatic.

So after they had suffered the cross for thirty-eight days, to match the thirty-eight days that Gaius had been in their care, he declared that he would bring them to their victims’ graves - so they could properly atone before they died.

That’s exactly right, Solus. They were pirates - their victims were buried at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. And so Gaius took them there himself, dragging them down into the depths while we watched from the shore.

When he brought them back up their crosses were all shattered, and their bodies had caved in on themselves. As if the gods had taken each of them in hand - and crushed them like rotten figs.

Jason’s influence brushed the tip of my nose, and the dread pirate’s influence dragged me to the bottom of the sea.

Scythas reached him first, tackling him into the far wall and illuminating the room in another flash of amethyst light as the stone absorbed the impact. Selene was next, striking his chest over his heart with the tips of her index and middle fingers - and though the Oracle’s strike was far less explosive, not even strong enough to cause a flicker in the room’s amethyst veins, Jason's pneuma recoiled like a kicked dog. Finally, the man himself reasserted control over the vital essence of his soul, the roaring blue flames in his eyes dimming in a split second.

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“Solus!” three heroic cultivators cried out, each of them in fear.

My heart beat a third time. I sucked in a breath and each of them froze, already halfway back across the room. I held it for a moment.

“Jason,” I exhaled.

Gravitas.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles slammed flat against the floor, pressed down by the captain’s virtue. I put everything I had behind it, like I hadn’t done since the days before I was a slave. It had been a year and a half since Tartarus had taken me in its hand like that, since death had whispered its name directly in my ear. My spirit raged in response.

“Control yourself,” I commanded. The words were for myself as much as for him. I hardly heard them over the ringing of my ears.

Jason’s pneuma rushed abruptly back into him. His influence vanished from the room.

“Sol,” Scythas gasped, halfway risen from a sprinter’s crouch.

Selene crossed the remaining distance between us in the blink of an eye, laying one hand flat over my heart while the other gripped my chin and tilted my head back. Her golden veil had been torn from her face at some point, her hair pulled free of its braids by the unreasonable speed of a Heroic cultivator. It spilled over her shoulders and down her back, the sight familiar for reasons I couldn’t describe.

Burning scarlet eyes met mine searchingly. Of all the Heroic cultivators that Griffon and I had encountered in Olympia, she was the only one who knew that I was exactly what I appeared to be. A Sophic cultivator, as the Greeks understood it.

“How?” she whispered. It was a fair question. Even a moment under a wrathful Hero’s influence should have been fatal for a man of my standing. Especially an influence like Jason’s.

I forced shut the snapping jaws of my spirit, wrestling everything down so that the Heroes in the room would only see cool contempt in my expression. But I couldn’t fool Selene. Not while she had her hand pressed against my chest - when she could feel my heart hammering against my ribs at double time.

“I’m not that frail,” I reassured her anyway. When she didn’t seem convinced, I went on, “He only put the Aegean on my shoulders. He could have heaped the Ionian and the Adriatic on as well - it still wouldn’t have been enough to crush me.”

Was I exaggerating? Of course. I had felt my bones flex as Jason’s influence dragged me to the bottom of the sea, felt the pressure force my vital breath from my lungs. Had I stayed there, at his mercy, I had no idea how long I could have borne it before I caved in on myself.

Above all, I was fortunate that his influence had manifested itself as it did. If there was a single thing that I excelled at as a cultivator of the captain’s virtue, it was withstanding pressure.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Jason said, chuckling in helpless relief. He sank fully to the floor, rolling onto his back and laughing out loud. “Of course not! Not you - thank the Muses and the Fates, not you! You’re made of sterner stuff than that.”

I muscled down a cough. Something told me that hacking up blood would ruin his impression of me.

“Reckless bastard,” Scythas growled, turning and laying a kick into his fellow Hero’s side. Jason only laughed harder. “What if you hit the Oracle instead, huh!? Would you still be laughing!?”

Three sharp knocks on the bone-white door silenced them both. Selene’s head whipped up. With one hand still pressed over my heart, she leaned past me and laid her other palm on the door. Her pneuma wound through it in a warm current.

“Who is it?” her voice came out calm, entirely at odds with her wild hair and torn silks.

“Me.”

Selene looked down at me, just a shade past panicked. What do we do? she mouthed, and somehow, the mystery of the Babylonian shard allowed me to read her lips as if she was speaking Latin.

I thought about it. Behind us, Scythas and Jason remained stock still. They didn’t even breathe. Admittedly, they had good reason to be worried.

Scythas knew for a fact that his veil of obstructing wind wouldn’t hold up under the scrutiny of a Tyrant in their domain, nor would it escape the Hurricane Oracle’s gaze. Outside of those known quantities, he’d assured me that he could slip past anyone on this mountain. All except for one. There was one other unknown quantity, a man that Scythas couldn’t gauge one way or another.

Socrates rapped impatiently on Selene’s ivory door. “Send the boy out. You’ve had him in there long enough.”

Scythas had no idea whether or not his veil would hold up under the Gadfly’s scrutiny, and I had no idea how my mentor would react if he caught the two of them sneaking out. Was it worth risking?

If I wasn’t still high off my near miss beneath the waves, my answer might have been yes. Alas.

“You’ve apologized and you’ve thrown a fit,” I addressed Jason, rising to my feet. Draped over me as she had been in order to reach the door, Selene gasped as I lifted her with me, slung over my shoulder. “After you convinced Scythas to smuggle you in here under his power, not yours, and after I pulled you out of the veil myself, because you couldn’t bring yourself to say the first word.”

With every word, I pressed him down. Until the ocean flames behind his eyes were nothing but dull embers.

“Are you satisfied with that?” I demanded, while Socrates hammered on the door. “Is that all your word is worth?”

“No.”

And with the last of my strength, the final scrap that hadn’t been spent resisting his influence and then hammering him to the floor, I pulled him back up. Gravitas forced him to his feet.

“Then prove it,” I ordered the Hero of the Alabaster Isles. “You say you regret hesitating in the presence of the Gadfly? Then here’s your second chance.”

And with that, ignoring Selene‘s protests and Scythas’ vicious cursing, I threw open the door. On the other side of the threshold, Socrates stood with a scowl on his bearded face. As soon as he saw the state of the room and those of us in it, the scowl darkened.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me, in an unnervingly neutral tone.

I considered the scene. The Scarlet Oracle draped over my shoulder like a sack of flour, her clothing and hair wildly askew. A pair of Heroes that were assuredly not welcome in this part of the mountain. And of course, the fucking room.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” I said at length.

Socrates inhaled deeply.

“Boy-“

Whatever he’d planned to say next, it was cut short by an eagle’s echoing cry. The cries of women followed soon after. Tucked behind the column as we were, the other oracles couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them. However, we could hear them.

“An eagle!”

“How majestic-“

“Filthy bird, out, out, out-!”

Sorea swerved sharply into view, soaring over Socrates’ head and beating his wings hard to kill his momentum. Massive talons wrapped gently around my outstretched arm, and Selene held out her hands beneath his beak while he heaved up a message.

“Only in Rome,” Socrates muttered in disgust, watching my messenger eagle vomit a roll of papyrus into Selene’s cupped hands.

Selene unfurled the message and tilted the sheet so the four of us could read it.

“Oh no,” Scythas breathed.

“What does it say?” Socrates demanded. I read it again, just to be sure. It didn’t take me long - the message was only a single word.

“Behold.”

The oracles hollered as another eagle swept through the courtyard. Socrates snorted, spinning on his heel, and stepped forward as the supporting column in front of us exploded. Griffon surged through the flying shrapnel, thirty pankration hands blazing around him. Socrates raised a disdainful hand, weaving a hundred truths into that simple motion, and -

“This is justice,” my father told me. The bisected corpse of the fallen sun god reached up and laid its incomprehensible palm over my eyes. “Remember its face.”

- Griffon assaulted us all with a memory of something that even he couldn’t fully recall. Instead of the vivid clarity that Socrates had forced upon me with his remembrance of war, this was entirely a question of shock and awe. It was rough, and it was dirty. There was no particular argument being made - only a statement.

The former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn struck us all with the entrancing wonder of the fallen sun god. And in the split second that it took Socrates to shake it, Griffon closed the gap and punched him in the throat.