Youngest of the Convocation
I danced through lashing coils of flesh and lowered my shoulder into the back of Gyro’s man. The lowly Civic cultivator’s head snapped back, but he held stubbornly onto his blade while I hefted him up like a sack of grain without breaking stride. For all the good it did him. What remains of his borrowed blade could hardly be called a dagger - now it was little more than a hilt and a jagged shard of iron the length of my middle finger.
“Lord Aetos!” he gasped, staring upside down at the pained drakaina while I ran. “Wait, I can still fight! I can still-”
“Can’t fight without a weapon,” I told him. “Wouldn’t matter if you had one.”
Thon and I closed the distance in desperate strides. Aristotle, for his part, stepped lightly over thrashing mounds of flesh and somehow outpaced the monster's reach at a walking pace. I kicked up sand just short of Gyro and the shield woman as they dashed out of the graveyard of broken timber beyond the ship. I dumped my brother's freedman onto the beach between us.
I stood tall, snapping the fletching off of Damon’s arrow and pulling the shaft out of my shoulder. Cauterized flesh bled once again. I dispersed the pain and re-sealed both ends of the wound myself with an invocation of virtue’s flame. I met my brother’s eyes resolutely.
“We can kill it.”
“Of course we can, brother,” Gyro said, helping his man up. “How was your swim? Bracing, I hope?”
“To say the least.” I turned to the shield bearer. “Who are you?”
She was tall for a woman of her standing. Muscular enough that her status as a cultivator could not be denied - her shoulders and arms were cut by martial labor, her thighs thickly defined. She wore sandals of white leather that crisscrossed up her ankles and a tattered shawl of white silk that hung from her right shoulder, leaving the left bare so it wouldn’t obstruct her shield.
An unmarred breastplate of fine bronze clung to her like a second skin beneath the shawl, forged to mimic the lines of muscle it guarded. Greaves of the same quality bronze flashed as her stance adjusted and her shawl shifted over her legs. A gossamer of a silver-white thread held the golden braids of her hair in place, paint of the same color accenting curving scarlet eyes. She was regal, and she was strong. She had something we needed.
The woman from Olympia smiled and offered me her hand beneath the shawl, keeping her adamant shield up on her unclothed arm.
“My name is Elena. I’m on a sacred quest, sent from Olympia,” she said graciously, gripping my hand. “Are you as mad as your brother?”
“You’ll have to narrow it down.”
Elena laughed, clear and bright. “There are more of you?”
“Four in all,” Gyro said, dumping onto the sands a bundle of wooden shrapnel he’d gathered from the ship’s remains and taking his broken sword to one of the planks. “Our father vowed to stop at three sons if he wasn’t granted a daughter by then, so of course the heavens punished him with a set of twins. This is one of two.”
“Stavros,” I said. It was likely just the night air and my dip into the Ionian depths, but her skin felt oddly warm. I let her hand go. “The beautiful man on the other side of the beach is my twin, Fotios.”
She smirked. “I see. And where’s the fourth?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We didn’t make it that far down.”
That scarlet gaze swept over me, eyes a color I had - seen burning, one gazing up from the eastern range while the other glared within the depths of the western mountains - never seen in my living memory. Elena took a note of how drenched I was. She looked past me, at the serpent with a woman’s upper body dragging itself onto the beach while my twin danced around it with his flaming whip, and beyond to the whirlpool rising up around the island like an upended dome. It didn’t take her long to make the connection.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she told me with sad sympathy, while she laid her calloused hand on Gyro’s shoulder.
“Don’t be,” I told her. “Not yet. He’s in a bad spot, but he’s not gone. It was Damon that saved us.”
“I was wondering how you got yourself shot fighting a snake,” Gyro said, fierce joy in the dimpling of his cheeks. He carved away at his plank of wood with deft motions, somehow cutting clean edges despite his broken blade more closely resembling a saw. “Damon always said he could hit any target he wanted, even blind or underwater. Seems he was right.”
“Stavros,” Thon said urgently. He pressed his back to mine, raising his borrowed iron in an amateur’s grip. Boxing had always been his strong suit. “It’s shaking itself off.”
He wasn’t wrong - the keening of the drakaina’s feminine voice was tapering off. It would be on us again soon, and I still had to secure our proper tool.
“And you are?” Elena asked the ugly freedman at my back, pleasantly uncaring of the rallying threat.
“His name is Thon,” I said, brusquely cutting short any possible back and forth. Then, before she could ask, “and this is-“ I stopped short, frowning at Gyro’s blood-hungry man. What was his name again?
“Menoeces, Lord Aetos.”
“Call him Stavros,” Gyro said, elbowing me in my side. “Better yet, call him a bastard for not bothering to know your name.”
“He was a slave just a few hours ago,” I protested. Damn it, no, we didn’t have time for this.
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“Even slaves have names, brother. They’re still men like you and I. The only thing that separates us from them is a handful of gold.”
“You’re a kind slaver, are you?” Elena's eyes were measuring.
“The kindest there is,” Menoeces firmly agreed. Gyro only hummed and reached into a fold in his chiton.
“A kind slaver,” he mused. “I wonder if anyone can claim that title.” From the fold in his logic, he pulled a wineskin and drank deeply from it before tossing it to Menoeces. “Quick, while there’s time. Get some courage in you.”
The newly freed slave drank sparingly from it and handed it over to me. I passed it over my shoulder to Thon before taking my own swift pull. The kykeon was sweet and alight with cinnamon and clove, burning pleasantly down my throat and returning warm vitality to my flesh. I offered it to the shield woman last.
“Thank you, but I don’t drink.”
“At all?” Gyro raised an eyebrow, shaving one last strip of wood from the plank. Was that…?
“I hear things when I drink,” Elena said abashedly. “So I try to avoid it when I can. It was a gift from my mother, I’m afraid-”
Her expression hardened in an instant and she lunged past us just as Thon cried warning and the cascading sound of parting sands gave away the threat. I turned and saw Elena raise her shield, strapped to her left forearm while her right arm braced it. This time it wasn’t violent noise she was blocking, but the serpent entire.
The drakaina’s narrow head rammed into the adamant shield and the same reverberating sound as before rippled out from the point of impact. The woman from Olympia was thrown back, digging up clouds of sand as she doggedly kept her feet. The monster reared up and spread wide its jaw and its dark hoods of skins, wailing.
“I WANT TO LO-”
A line of vibrant light whipped up and encircled its upper jaw, and I yanked its mouth shut again. The line of rigging rope that I had reclaimed while rushing to rejoin my brother thrummed ominously in my grip - even with my pneuma and myriad truths reinforcing it, this was rope better suited to wrangling a goat than a monster. The serpent bucked, nearly pulling me off my feet. Thon, Gyro, and Menoeces grabbed on and dragged me back down.
“Elena!” I shouted.
“I’m coming!” The shield woman stomped hurriedly out of the sand, having been hammered down nearly waist-deep.
The drakaina assaulted our ears again, no less unsettling with its mouth shut- moreso, if anything. I snarled and banished the memory of my mother screaming through clenched teeth over our father’s grave. Obnoxious fucking snake.
“No time! Pass the shield!”
“Out of the question!”
“Whore of three cities-” I was cut off by Gyro shifting his grip around my waist and tackling me out of the way just as the monster shifted its efforts and lunged down into us. Thon and Menoeces scattered, the latter throwing what remained of his blade at its liquid black eyes and missing horribly.
We made space, the whirlpool precariously close behind. I cracked the rope and whipped the eye Menoeces had been aiming for, bursting it like a rotten fig for all the good it did. Translucent eyelids folded over the wound, three of them in all, and when they retracted the eye was whole again.
“Living is out of the question!?” I shouted furiously. “That shield’s our only chance! Did Bakkhos send you here to die!?” On the other side of the monster, bracing herself in front of the gutted ship, she shook her head.
“Of course not!”
“Then give it here!”
“I refuse!”
I yelled in wordless frustration and surged forward to catch the drakaina’s whipping tail. It slammed into my gut, driving the air from my lungs and shattering at least three of my ribs. Even at its thinning tip I couldn’t join my hands around it, could barely get a grip at all. The monster undulated, and I knew it was going to toss me back into the whirlpool. I emptied my pneumatic chambers and called upon conviction -
A good man is a mountain once he’s planted his feet.
-and held it in place. The serpent whipped its entire body around trying to throw me, broke another rib and drove me to the very edge of the rocks separating the island from the riptide. But my principle lessened the magnitude of its strength, and it lessened my motion in turn. For just a moment, the monster couldn’t shake me.
Gyro seized the opportunity, striking it from the side and burying what remained of his sword in one of the gaps between its cratered scales. His pneuma spiked and the hilt in his hand glowed cherry red. The monster cried out, flames spewing from its vile mouth as Gyro used his sword as a conduit to flood its innards with searing heat.
He leapt off with nothing but a glowing hilt, what remained of the blade oozing out of the wound in molten rivulets. I threw the serpent’s tail aside at the same moment and ran, muscling down the worst of my broken ribs and refilling my pneumatic chambers with the agony. I slid under the monster as it whipped back around and tried to knock my head off my shoulders. Beneath the fractured silver glow, I saw Thon leap forward with his sword raised high above his head. I saw him bring it down with everything he had.
The sword broke apart on the serpent's hide. The tail continued forward and struck him in the gut. I saw in the clarity of silver light the way his eyes bulged, the blood that sprayed out of his mouth. Then he was gone, slamming through the gutted frame of Elena’s ship faster than my eyes could track him.
At that moment, it ceased to be a question of if. Faceless divinity had cursed these creatures to live forever. The Fates had made them impervious to death by mortal means. Even the Father of Rhetoric had declared them an impossible threat to overcome.
As if any of that mattered. These abominations had laid their vile flesh on what was mine. Glory at the peak or shame in distant Tartarus - whatever followed, the result would be the same.
I would see it done.
“If you won’t give me the shield, I’ll take it,” I promised the woman from Olympia. I leveraged the full weight of my influence against hers, a captain against a junior that had only taken a few steps into the Sophic realm. Elena tensed, halfway back to the ship that Thon had disappeared inside, and turned her shield towards me.
“You’ll try, cultivator,” she grimly replied.
Gyro landed between us, eyes on the monster while he pulled his carved plank of wood from the sand where he’d planted it.
“This isn’t a fight we can afford to have right now, brother,” he told me. I rose up on one knee, swallowing back blood. It was difficult to breathe.
“You don’t understand-”
“Elena,” he said, cutting me off. “Explain it to him, as you did to me.”
Then, before my disbelieving eyes, my brother joined a wrecked ship's broken plank to the iron hilt that was all that remained of his sword. He’d carved it into the shape of a wavy blade, with such precision that it looked almost natural joined to the finely wrought hilt. That is, if you ignored the fact that it was made of wood. He tore a strip of scarlet cloth from his cult attire and wrapped it around the point where it would meet iron. He met my incredulous stare with a wink and exploded up into the air.