Hero of the Alabaster Depths
When Jason was six years old, his father sat him on his shoulders while they sailed into a cyclone and told him it was time he learned about standing.
Standing, or reputation as the mortals called it, was something any man could understand whether he was a cultivator or not. But, as with most things, its significance increased along with pneuma. Standing was what contrasted a man from his peers. In a financial sense, standing was the difference between the man that cleaned stables for a living, and the man that owned those stables. In a physical sense, it was the man that sat front row for every wrestling match his city put on, contrasted with the man that was in the pits competing.
Jason had been young then, and terrified of the approaching storm. The panicked hollering of his fathers crew hadn’t helped. So his father had provided him with an even simpler example to illustrate the point.
The Reaver That Broke the Loom had stepped up onto the Golden Thread’s figurehead, a winged boy with a noose around his throat, and forced Jason to look behind them. Below, at the men roaring against the waves. He forced Jason to watch as his crew gnashed their teeth and wrenched their oars through the sea. Veins bulging, chests heaving for breath. All while Jason’s father stood above them, at the top of the ship’s hierarchy in every way that mattered.
Even a pirate knows the way of things, the Reaver had said, before turning back to face the storm.
A slave knew his place when the freedman spit in his face. A freedman knew his place when the metic chased him from his wares. The metic knew his place when the citizen sneered at his petty wealth. The citizen knew his place when the aristocrat humiliated him in the agora.
And the aristocrat knew his place when the tyrant took him in hand.
A cultivator was no different. A cultivator labored under the same hierarchy, only more so. The Reaver’s men were each cultivators of infamously high standing, men that could do unspeakable things with nothing but their own vital essence and whatever was at hand. Yet there they labored, fighting the wrathful sea while Jason looked down on them all. He was hardly a cultivator at all back then, and a child besides. But they labored for his benefit nonetheless.
Why do you think that is, little rat? his father had asked, and Jason had fought the terror of the coming storm just long enough to answer.
Because you told them to.
The Reaver laughed, and said that he was exactly right.
Jason sat on the captain’s shoulders, his standing greater than anyone else on the Golden Thread, because his father had decided it would be so. And no one on that ship questioned his father.
His father had told him they could push the crew further. At Jason’s confused look, he’d elaborated - perhaps on top of laboring so Jason wouldn’t have to, and speaking to him with the respect a superior was due, his father could have them share their rations of food and drink with him as well. Or he could go beyond that - he could demand that each of them pay a portion of their wages to the Reaver’s son as a sign of deference.
Caught between terror and bewilderment, Jason had asked why his father would ever treat the Golden Thread’s crew so poorly. These were men that Jason had grown up admiring. These were the men he had dreamed of rowing beside when his father finally deemed him fit to join them. Why would he treat them like slaves?
Why wouldn’t I? his father had asked in turn. That’s what they are, in the end. That’s what every man that stands below you is. Why not fleece them for everything they can give you?
Scandalized, yet knowing the kind of man his father was even back then at six years old, Jason gave him the only answer he could. The only answer that the Reaver would possibly accept.
They’ll mutiny.
A roar had gone up then, a chorus of voices raised in vehement agreement. The crew had been listening, and they didn’t hesitate to chime in. His father had only smirked and nodded in satisfaction.
Standing is what separates greater existences from their lessers. Once you become a man worth talking about, standing becomes renown, renown becomes glory.
Kleos. The divine hierarchy that governed them all.
However, the nature of kleos was that of a ladder. Every great man started at the lowest rung. His father could place him at the top of the financial hierarchy, the social hierarchy, even the political hierarchy - but no man could climb the divine ladder in his son’s place. And if you were on the ladder, you were a rung to everyone else. There to be grasped, there to be stepped on.
It was natural for man to fear the heights. It was terrifying to reach for that next rung, knowing the man you would have to step over to get to it. That fear won out over every man eventually. Whether it was as a Citizen, as a Philosopher, as a Hero - even as a Tyrant. Eventually, every man decided that what was required to reach the next rung was more than he was willing to risk. That was how you kept a crew of significant men. That was how you kept a portion of the world docile beneath your thumb.
But every man has his limit, and it’s the Captain’s job to know it. Press as close as you like to that line in the sand, it makes no difference. Every man below you is a willing slave until you cross his line. It’s only once you cross it that you’re inviting mutiny into your ship.
No matter how many years passed, Jason would never shake the feeling that the king below the waves had sent that storm personally. And though his men urged the Reaver to turn back, though any other captain would have fled long ago, his father had held them true to course. The Reaver That Broke the Loom had stood defiant against the rain and the wind.
When the time comes for you to bite the hand that feeds you, don’t you dare hesitate, his father had said. And when you are the captain and the first of your men comes for your place on the ladder, remember this:
Once he’s crossed his line in the sand, you’re nothing to that man but another tribulation.
Jason clamped a hand down on the scarlet son’s wrist and dragged it roughly away from Sol and the Oracle. Burning hands of Griffon’s violent intent punched and clawed their way into existence, each one aiming for a different vulnerable spot on his body. Behind, Scythas whistled sharply and a gale enveloped Jason as well as Solus and Scarlet Oracle, deflecting and dispersing the worst of the attack.
Since that very first moment he’d laid eyes on Solus’ student, Jason had known he was a threat to everyone around him. He’d seen it as soon as he walked into that club. Griffon had been staring down Alazon, a Heroic Young Aristocrat of the Raging Heaven, as easily as he would a vagrant beggar. Jason had known it then, like he knew the rolling of the ocean beneath his feet.
Griffon had glanced at him, over to Anastasia and Scythas, inevitably settling on his master. But from Alazon to Jason, to Anastatia, and to Scythas, that look in his eyes hadn’t changed. Not once. Not even for a second. Not even when they settled upon Solus himself.
Wherever Griffon‘s line in the sand was, he had left it behind when he crossed the Ionian. To him, every existence on this earth was nothing but a tribulation for him to overcome.
“Control yourself,” Jason said harshly, projecting his voice over the wind. Blazing fists of manifested pneuma pounded at the gale wind shell, ripping and tearing and grasping for purchase. Heedless.
“Griffon,” Solus said quietly. “What are you talking about?”
Every manifested hand slammed against the curtain of wind one more time, all of them at once, and then they vanished. After a cautious beat, Scythas allowed his winds to disperse as well.
Griffon set his sheathed blade against the floor and leaned artfully onto it, blood running rivulets down his forehead and around his eyes. He sneered at the holy woman of his city like she was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen.
“I’ve met eight of the nine oracles since we last spoke, Solus,” he said, deceptively calm. “During your time in the legions, did you ever have the privilege of meeting a holy woman?”
The captain from the west stared hard at his student.
“I did.”
Scythas exhaled a shaking breath behind them.
“Of course you did,” the Griffon that was also the hungry raven said easily. “And when you met her, did she grace you with her majesty?”
Solus grimaced. “Is that what Greeks call it?”
The Oracles tittered and laughed. Jason braced his heart against the simultaneous sensations of drowning, melting, being crushed and hung and turned to stone. Majesty was admittedly a kind word for it.
“So she did,” Griffon said. “And tell me, oh master, was that a sensation you’ll ever forget? Was that an experience you could possibly mistake for a mortal woman’s charm?”
Solus’ silence was answer enough.
“Then believe me when I tell you -” the sword the scarlet son had never bothered to use slammed cleanly through the ivory and gold tile of the floor, sheath and all. His pneuma rose precipitously around him. “- she is not one of them. This pretender is wearing the uniform and mouthing the words, but there is no majesty in her soul.”
“This is where the oracles reside,” Solus said, waving his arm expansively at the late kyrios’ underground courtyard. “She was living here well before the kyrios died. You think he couldn’t tell the difference? The man that spoke to any oracle he wanted, any time he felt the urge?”
“Living with the king doesn’t make you a queen,” Griffon said. Jason’s eyes widened.
“You dare?” Scythas ground out, stalking over to Solus’ other side. He glared furiously at the Griffon, and the Griffon glared right back. “You come here uninvited, unwanted, and make a mess of a great man’s living memory - and you have the audacity to question an Oracle’s right to be here? When you are the intruder?”
“Why not?” Griffon asked with disdain. “No one else was going to.”
“Your master just told you,” Jason said, because Scythas looked too enraged to speak. He’d always been too emotional when it came to the kyrios. “This is hallowed ground in the Raging Heaven Cult. The kyrios never took guests here, never entertained lovers in his private estate. No one but an oracle or the kyrios could possibly live down here.”
“And yet here you are. Here we all are, my master and his crows. I suppose that would make him the kyrios, but what does that leave the three of us?” The narrowed eyes of a predator swept up and down Jason and Scythas, the color of blood and molten heat. “The two of you don’t look like seers to me. I don’t feel like an Oracle, though I suppose I could be wrong.”
“The wind runner is pretty enough for it,” teased the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles.
“Shut up,” Griffon said at once, and all three of the holy women erupted into giggles once again. An utterly bizarre sight, made more so by the fact that one of them looked older than the city of Olympia itself.
“You’re certain of this,” Solus finally said, something formless passing between himself and his student. Nothing that Jason could perceive with a Hero’s limited senses. After a beat, Solus sighed. “Why are you lying to me, Selene?”
The young woman slung over his shoulder, noticeably silent up to this point, blinked and shook herself out of a trance. She looked away from Griffon for the first time since leaving her room, meeting Solus’ eyes with earnesty.
“I’m not,” she said. And then she winced. “Well, not entirely.”
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Scythas muttered something under his breath. The words apoplexy and acute brain suffering were all that Jason caught from it, through the barrier of his own disbelief.
“He’s not wrong, then,” Solus observed, and the Oracle’s - the girl’s? - head bobbed in agreement.
“He’s not. However, he’s not right either.”
“Then by all means,” Griffon said, “enlighten me.”
“She isn’t an oracle yet. But she will be.”
Socrates came striding out of the Scarlet Oracle’s quarters, shutting the bone white door behind him with one hand while the other cradled a mangled bust of a woman’s head. Jason caught a glimpse of the room beyond just before the door slammed shut. Everything was as it had been before Solus pulled him out of Scythas’ veil. Somehow, the Gadfly had fixed it all.
The first philosopher gestured irritably with his free hand, and the chunk of marble that he’d thrown at Griffon’s chest leapt across the room. He caught it and pressed it against the partially reformed marble bust of a woman’s head, and when his hand came away it was whole again.
Selene, the girl that may or may not have been an oracle, sighed in relief at the sight.
“Thank you.”
The Gadfly grunted. “Be more discerning about who you invite into your room. And get off the boy’s shoulder already, you look ridiculous.”
Selene flushed. Solus set her down, brow furrowed as he worked over the Gadfly’s words.
“The oracles are meant to be crones,” he said.
“That they are. And do you know why, boy?”
Solus grimaced again. “Men hunger for various things.”
“Wrong,” Griffon said quietly, riveted on the Gadfly.
“Wrong now, but right once upon a time,” the Gadfly corrected him. Idly, Jason wondered how many centuries Solus had spent fighting demons out in the furthest reaches of the West. How long had it been since he’d stepped foot in a free city? “Before we forgot the names of those that came before us, chastity was of prime concern for a seer. Do any of you unruly children know why?”
All three oracles raised their hands. The Gadfly ignored them all.
“Back then,” Selene said softly, “oracles were handpicked by their patron. Blood relation was not needed, and so the divine preferred their hosts to have no relations at all.”
The Gadfly nodded once. “A man I once knew liked to say that an oracle was like a glove for their god, perfectly fitted to their hand. The immortals used them to affect change that a direct touch wasn’t suited for. And what man, mortal or divine, wants to put his hand in a glove that’s filled with seed?”
The Gadfly glanced meaningfully back at the late kyrios’ personal quarters. Jason wished he could say that the line was out of character for the memories he had of the man. But it wasn’t.
“But that was before,” the first philosopher continued. “Now, we cling to what’s left of our divinity with everything we have. There are no patrons left, so we preserve the last spark of those that were chosen through their blood. The oracles are no longer forbidden from breeding - now, they’re required.”
“A holy woman needs an heir,” each of the three Oracles said in eerie unison.
“So we wait until the Oracle has had her child. Then, when her mother has prepared her for her duties and is ready to torment men in the afterlife, she anoints her daughter in prophecy and mystery faith. Then her child’s child begins the search for a proper partner. On and on it goes, until the day we’ve finally wrung the last of the majesty from their blood.”
“Ever so cynical,” the Oracle of the Broken Tide said, the old woman’s cracked lips creasing in her distaste. “We’ve always hated that about you.” The Gadfly ignored her again.
“You’re the daughter of the oracle, then,” Solus said.
“I am,” she said sadly.
“Then where is she?” Griffon demanded. “I came to this festering city to see the Oracle. Where do I have to go to find her?”
Jason answered before he could think better of it. “Old Zalus’ domain.”
The Gadfly’s hand lashed out, rhetoric that Jason could not possibly hope to counter seething in his palm. Jason stoked the flames of his heroic spirit, called upon the Muse that wouldn’t answer, and all of it was too late, too slow. In vain.
[I'll find another, better o-]
The Gadfly smacked him over the head.
“Some things don’t need to be said just because you can say them,” the Gadfly rebuked him with a scowl. Jason raised a hand to his head. Somehow, his skull was still intact. It hadn’t even cut the skin. “After all you’ve seen this foolish child do, you thought it would be wise to give him information like that?”
Jason opened his mouth to argue. Then he thought about what he’d just said, and to whom.
He closed his mouth.
“Don’t even think about it,” the Gadfly said, dismissing him and rounding on Solus’ student. Fortunately, Griffon was still leaning on his sword and hadn’t gone running off to challenge a Tyrant in his domain. Yet. “You’ve come to see the Scarlet Oracle? To seek her wisdom? You can’t.”
Griffon stared steadily at him.
“No, not even then,” the Gadfly said, answering the unspoken challenge. “Even if you managed to infiltrate his domain, defy all his ethos, it wouldn’t change a thing. She won’t speak to you because she can’t speak to you.”
Griffon considered that for a long, tense moment. “Why?”
He asked Selene. Not the Gadfly.
“... The day that I was born, my mother fell asleep and never woke up again.” It was a disgraceful act to look upon an oracle’s unveiled face, disrespectful in the most blasphemous sense. But Jason found himself looking anyway. Here, leaning against Solus as she was with her hair and silks in disarray, she looked hardly like an oracle at all. It made the sorrow on her face even more painful to see. “They say that the last thing she did was name me, and then I fell right out of her arms. It happened so suddenly that my father had to catch me. She just collapsed back into the sheets, dead to the world. She hasn’t stirred since.”
“An illness?” Griffon asked. She shook her head.
“Nothing that the physicians had a name for. Certainly nothing they could cure.”
“She’s been asleep for sixteen years?” Solus prompted her, though not unkindly. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She nodded miserably, leaning further into his side. Across from them Griffon’s eyes narrowed, his fingers flexing unconsciously.
He turned the weight of his gaze and his pneuma both on the Gadfly.
“But you know.”
The Gadfly considered him. “I know nothing.”
Griffon spat at his feet.
“When you first saw Griffon,” Solus said, with that same distance from before. Working through a puzzle only a Tyrant could see. “You said something. A word with significance.”
“Sunkissed,” Selene whispered. “I recognized the memory he showed us.”
“This is justice. Remember its face.” Jason shivered.
“You’ve seen that corpse before?” Solus asked. She shook her head.
“Not in person, no. But I knew it anyway. My father used to tell me that we were all blessed by the sun - me, and him, and my mother. It’s why our hair is the color of the zenith. It’s why we have the dawn and the dusk in our eyes. I was blessed by the sun through my mother, who was blessed through her mother, who was blessed through her mother before.”
“You said your father was blessed, too,” Solus observed. “Are you saying…”
“That the roots of her family tree are an Ouroboros?” the Gadfly interjected, crossing his arms. “No. Polyzalus is no oracle’s son.”
“Then how -” Solus stopped himself. Understanding bloomed. “Sunkissed.”
Selene nodded shallowly. “When my father still lived in the Scarlet City, on the western mountain range, he went down alone to where the Burning Dusk’s mystery was kept. In that cavern, on that day, the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god blessed him. It pressed a kiss upon his brow. When he emerged from the mountain, he looked like heaven itself had painted him with an entirely different pallet.”
“You mean-” Scythas said.
“That memory was real?” Jason demanded.
Griffon spared them both a scornful glance. “My virtuous heart doesn’t lie.”
But that was- to touch a greater mystery of the world-
“Can it be fixed?” Solus asked the Gadfly. “The Oracle’s affliction. Can she be woken up?” Selene, for her part, dipped her head further, her golden hair shading her face in place of a veil.
“I already told you,” she whispered.
“She can.”
The Scarlet Oracle’s daughter whipped her head up, and her Heroic pneuma flooded the courtyard.
“What? What?” she demanded, her voice rising along with her pneuma. The scarlet flames in her eyes blazed. “Is this funny to you?”
“It’s not,” the Gadfly said, weathering the blazing heat of her pneuma with nothing but a faint grimace.
“You said she couldn’t be cured. It wasn’t just the physicians that said it, it wasn’t just the other oracles. You said it! Every time I ever asked, you told me you couldn’t do it!”
“I said those things before. But I’m not saying them now,” the Gadfly said. Solus quickly turned the arm he had around the girl’s shoulders into a restraint when she made to lunge, cheeks flushed and eyes wide with outrage.
“You lied!” she accused him. “All these years, you lied to me! You lied!”
“You lied!” The three Oracles chorused in joyful spite. Their majesty rippled through the room with every repetition. “You lied! You lied! You lied!”
“The kyrios lied.”
They all fell silent.
The Gadfly raised the bust of a woman’s head still held in his hand, turning it so they could all observe her features. Even without color, it was impossible to mistake her for anything other than the mother of the girl in the sun ray silks.
“An oracle is a divine existence, even if only in the slightest of degrees,” he said with solemn intonation. “That’s why they live such long lives. That’s why nature preserves them. Any illness that can overcome their majesty, then, must itself be divine. There are only two things known to man that can cure a divine affliction.”
“Nectar and ambrosia,” Griffon said, utterly focused on the philosopher.
“Nectar and ambrosia,” Socrates agreed. “And since the day you were born, who is the only man on this earth that has demonstrated the ability to refine such a substance?”
Steam drifted up around Selene’s burning eyes, tears turned to vapor before they could be shed.
“Why?” she asked. A multitude of questions housed in a single word.
“Why didn’t he offer your father a cure if he knew he had it? Why did he lie to you every time you asked him? Why was the kyrios the man that he was?” The Gadfly sighed. “There isn’t a wise man alive that could answer any of those questions.”
“But the kyrios is dead,” Solus said, “and he took his nectar and his ambrosia with him.”
“He did,” the Gadfly agreed.
“So what does it matter?” Selene asked. But now, mixed with the bitterness and the anger, there was an undercurrent of hope. “He was the only one that could create it, wasn’t he?” The holy girl begged him with her eyes to disprove her. And so he did.
“During his time here, the kyrios was the only man in the free Mediterranean to synthesize divine sustenance, largely because he felt it was proper that that be the case. He was never the only man capable of following this process.”
“You know,” Griffon said, a vicious smile revealing his teeth. “Worthless old man. Just say it.”
Socrates scoffed. “Old I may be, but I’m worth far more than you.”
“Well?” Selene pressed, gripping Solus’ restraining arm tightly. The scarlet flames in her eyes flickered. “Can you create it?”
The Gadfly muttered something under his breath, and tossed the bust of Selene’s mother away so he could rummage through a fold in his tunic. A hand of manifested intent caught it out of the air, rotating it slowly while Griffon looked it over. The Gadfly pulled a folded piece of papyrus out and flicked it at the captain from the west. Solus caught it between two fingers and shook it open, revealing a map of the free Mediterranean.
A map of the free Mediterranean that was covered in markings.
“What is this?” Solus asked while Jason, Scythas, and Selene crowded around the map.
“No matter how much the late kyrios enjoyed prodding me with questions, I was never close enough in his confidence to share his recipes and refinement techniques with. No one was. However, it’s common knowledge that he mastered this process and discovered these materials during his time as a Hero. What is less commonly known, but still within the scope of my understanding, is how he spent his years in the Heroic Realm. And where.”
“So if we follow his steps,” Selene said excitedly, hope and joy finally overtaking outrage and doubt. “If we look where he’s been-!”
“We’ll find what he found,” Griffon said, placing the bust of Selene’s mother into her hands. She hugged it tightly to her chest, more steam drifting from the corners of her eyes. Griffon shouldered Scythas aside, the Hero of the Scything Squall gritting his teeth but making space. Side-by-side, the captain from the west and his student considered the map of the late kyrios’ epic.
“This will work? You’re certain?” Selene asked in a hitching voice.
“Nothing is certain,” the Gadfly said gruffly. Then, to Solus and his student: “But this is as good a use of your time as any. You’ve both proven today that you’re not fit for a horse’s stable, let alone a city full of civilized people. Take the map and begon from my sight. Go be a problem for the rest of the world while I think about what to do with you.”
“Where do we start?” Griffon asked Solus without hesitation, following the finger his master was tracing across the map. He added his own finger, jabbing at a particular marking as they exchanged another silent conversation.
The Gadfly jabbed his own finger to the papyrus, a small mark of liquid gold.
“You’ll go here first.” he declared, leaving no room for argument. “Of all the conjectures associated with the kyrios’ recipe, one element has always been constant. Go here and find me a golden cup filled with spirit wine. Return it to me without spilling a drop. I, your grandfather, will handle the rest.”
Selene answered for them, wedged in between the two and smiling like the sun.
“We will!”