The Son of Rome

“... Truthfully, it’s impossible for someone like me to have known a man like him,” the heroic cultivator said, winding down his somber recollection. “In the end, all I can offer tonight is my gratitude for the kindness he showed me, in those few moments that we crossed paths.”

Griffon made some polite noises, said a few empathetic words, but he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. His pupil shook faintly. Was it excitement or tightly leashed fear? The former, knowing him, though the latter would have been a more sensible reaction. The Heroic cultivator had spoken only briefly about his connection to the man of the night, but it had been enough.

Olympia laid more than just a Tyrant to rest tonight.

The kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult was dead.

“What about you two? How did you know him?” the hero asked, gathering himself. His brow suddenly furrowed, the flames behind his eyes flickering. “No, before that. Forgive me, I’ve forgotten myself. My name is Scythas.” His name was bestowed, not gifted - with an expectation of return.

“Griffon,” said the former Young Aristocrat without hesitation. Scythas’ burning eyes turned to me.

“Sol.”

“Well met,” he decided.

“Agreed.” Griffon’s arm was somehow still slung across the young hero’s shoulder. He jostled him a bit as he waved between the two of us. “As for us, our paths crossed with the kyrios the same way yours did.”

“Is that so?” Scythas asked, with interest and skilfully masked suspicion. His ploy had been clear from the start, describing his own circumstances here in Olympia in only the vaguest of terms. Even his acknowledgement of the kyrios’ identity had been reluctantly given - and without a proper name. Something told me he’d only given up that much because he’d felt he had to.

To prove himself. It was a gut instinct, but Griffon had clearly come to the same conclusion. Scythas was feeling us out. Testing our legitimacy while proving his own. But why bother validating himself? A hero had no reason to justify himself to a pair of uppity philosophers. The difference in our standing was clear as day.

Unless it wasn’t.

“Don’t pretend you can’t tell,” Griffon chided. “It’s written all over your face - a challenger recognizes a challenger. We’ve come to take part in the games, just like you.”

It wasn’t a lie. Griffon didn’t tell lies. But that only made the statement more absurd. I clenched my right fist, the one not in the heroic cultivator’s line of sight. What did he think he was doing?

Scythas looked to me, searching. He didn’t deny Griffon’s guess. Not just a Hero, but an Olympic athlete in the making.

Griffon cocked an expectant eyebrow. Unfortunately for him, he was no longer the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn, and I was no longer one of his slaves.

“He is taking part,” I said, stressing the distinction. If he thought I’d play along with his schemes forever, he was sorely mistaken.

I only had a moment to savor Griffon’s irritated glower. Scythas actually relaxed a fraction after I answered, as if I’d just cleared up a discrepancy in the story rather than openly contradicting it. Griffon noticed it, too, irritation turning to satisfaction in a split second.

“Sol is too modest,” he assured Scythas. “He may not be competing directly, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

Worthless Greek.

“Your mentor?” Scythas asked, genuinely surprised. There was a wisp of sensation, that formless something that Griffon had been describing before Scythas interrupted us in the first place.

There had been too much happening when I ascended. Even looking back on it now, with my pneuma unfettered, it was impossible to separate any one sensation from another. Moments, seconds, minutes and hours. They all bled together. It had been a vague impression in the Rosy Dawn when the shackles fell away and I called upon the captain’s virtue. I’d felt its effect on the people around me more clearly than before.

Now, I felt the brush of a heroic cultivator’s influence against mine. Instinctively, I knew he wasn’t gauging my pneuma. He’d already done that from the start, and we’d done the same. He was looking for something deeper than what that spiritual handshake could convey.

I flexed the captain’s virtue once, experimentally, and watched in fascination as the grasping hands of his influence slammed to the dirt.

Scythas pulled back, staring at me.

I was implicated in that moment. Griffon radiated victory, and all I could do was pretend that my actions had been intentional.

“Stare into the sun and you’ll go blind,” I said mildly. Griffon chuckled. Scythas, for his part, shuffled in place. He smoothed out his cult robes in a nervous gesture.

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It was madness for a mere Philosopher to masquerade as a Hero. The gulf that separated them was the difference between heaven and earth. Even so, I stepped towards him, appraising him as if he wasn’t my senior in age and cultivation both.

“You haven’t been here long,” I said, looking him up and down. The soft sounds of mourning enveloped us. Men and women alike sobbed or spoke in low, solemn tones to one another. The kyrios had passed too soon. What were they to do without him? “This is your first time competing.”

“And if it is?”

His hair was too long. It curled around the nape of his neck, a shade of blond just darker than Griffon’s. My officer’s instincts stirred, buried beneath salt and ash, and rose to the surface of my thoughts. He was projecting all the wrong things. His hair, his posture, the state of his clothes. His pneuma didn’t lie - he was a Hero. But he was failing to truly show it.

I offered Scythas my hand and he didn’t hesitate to take it. I held back a wince when he crushed mine in his - he thought he was the junior here, the underdog that needed to establish himself. It was only natural that he would show me his strength. I met his eyes calmly, and just before the fine bones in my hand broke, I invoked this new whisper-quiet version of the captain’s virtue. Scythas jerked back.

“Apologies,” he murmured.

“I’ve been in your place before.” It was even the truth. I set my shoulders, nodding when he unconsciously mimicked me. “Stand proud. You’re strong.”

His spine straightened and his spirit - the ever-present fire that burned in the eyes of all Heroic cultivators - flared in pleasure. I knew immediately that he wasn’t a man with many friends in this city. He reminded me of some of the younger legionnaires in the fifth, the ones who’d joined up because they had nowhere else to go. In fact, if he cut his hair…

No. None of that.

“Why haven’t I seen the two of you around the cult?” Scythas asked, lingering suspicion warring with genuine curiosity. He glanced at Griffon, sizing him up as a competitor now where before he’d been a potential… threat? Imposter? Was this even an exclusive event? It seemed like every cultivator in the city had turned out for it.

“I couldn’t stand my own cult’s politics,” Griffon said, shrugging one shoulder. “I’d rather not trade one for another.”

“You- what!? Are you out of your mind?”

“He is,” I confirmed. “In fact-”

My nose wrinkled.

Griffon said something in response to my comment, feigning offense, but I didn’t hear it. I inhaled slowly. What was that scent? It was faint, cloyingly sweet, like campfire smoke drifting on the wind. But there was something about it.

I held my breath and pinched my nose, ignoring the looks Griffon and Scythas gave me. The permeating stench of city scum and sweat brought by the crowds vanished.

The smell of sweet campfire smoke remained. I could taste it on my tongue.

“You don’t smell like mint either,” Griffon told me, and this time he actually did look offended. Scythas turned his head discreetly, sniffing his cult attire.

“Is something burning?” I finally asked. It wasn’t a funeral pyre. It tasted like burnt cypress. Griffon and Scythas shared a look. Scythas held up his torch. “Never mind.”

Griffon took it in stride, returning to the topic of the Raging Heaven Cult and his decision not to join its ranks. Scythas had already been led to believe that we’d been offered initiate status but declined it, and Griffon was happy to follow him down that path. What resulted was a heated discussion about the pros and cons of the greater mystery cults. He was thoroughly caught up in Griffon’s rhythm now.

I listened with half an ear, responding to leading comments Griffon made about the Rosy Dawn but otherwise tuning the rest of it out. Scythas was as vague with the details of his home cult as he was with the Cult of Raging Heaven, though he was easing out of his wariness towards us moment by moment. Instead, I focused on that smoke, tracing it as it wound through the crowd.

It didn’t follow the breeze like true smoke. There was intent behind it, and that became obvious as I followed its path with my own senses.

Where the smoke gathered, my Sophic sense grasped men and women of power. Smoke cycled around them in such dense clouds that I was surprised they could even breathe. It settled into their pores, leaving remnants of itself before moving on through the crowd in search of other powerful cultivators. When I reached for Scythas with my Sophic sense, I found nothing different about him. But the remnant of that scent was there. Not on Griffon, though, and not on me. Whatever this smoke was, it was marking Heroes in the crowd.

Scythas stopped mid-debate with Griffon, glancing curiously at me.

Ah. He’d felt it.

I’d just tagged every notable cultivator within shouting distance.

“It’s true that there are benefits to joining an institution like the Raging Heaven,” I said, carefully resisting the urge to start running. “Socialization, for one. There are certain things a peer can teach you that I never could.”

“See? Your mentor agrees,” Scythas added, smirking victoriously at Griffon. I could feel the question Griffon wanted to ask me, but instead he tilted his head in acknowledgement. Scarlet eyes flickered in the light of his Rosy Fingers.

“I suppose getting to know the competition wouldn’t hurt,” he mused in mock reluctance. He leered at Scythas. “What do you say, friend? Care to introduce this lowly sophist to the others?”

“No need,” I said.

In response to their wordless confusion I let my Sophic sense, my new influence, settle on their shoulders like a pair of Griffon’s pankration hands. It urged them both to turn west, and when they did they saw a woman pushing her way through the crowd towards us. Her otherwise flawless skin was riddled with deep scars, like a master had sculpted her from a block of marble and then handed the chisel off to a child.

Further beyond and further west was a man approaching at an even faster pace. He was massive, his stature alone clearing people from his path, and wore a skinned crocodile as a mantle and cloak over his cult attire.

There were others, converging on us from every direction. Converging on me.

“I took the liberty of gathering them myself,” I said blandly, committing to the act. My memories of the mentor that had done his best to make an upstanding man of an arrogant young patrician were faint, but I would never forget his tone.

It was a hunch, but I was confident in it. They were Heroes, all of them, wearing cult attire of varying colors. Not native citizens of Olympia, and not afraid to shoulder past those who were. They were young, strong, and raring for a fight.

After all the grief I’d given Griffon, I was the one who’d cast us to the wolves. Naturally, Griffon’s expression lit up as he realized what I’d done. Somehow, that made it worse.

Griffon stepped forward to meet the scarred woman as she shoved through the last few Sophic cultivators between us, pulling Scythas along with him. The wariness that had all but faded from the shorter Hero was back in full force as they greeted one another. Whatever was said, though, was drowned out in the next moment by an echoing boom.

The funeral drums began to beat.