An Unkindness
“You don’t know,” the raven known as Solus said dully. He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Socrates, the Scholar himself, hadn’t had an immediate answer for him. Why should this faceless man? There were even odds that there was no man at all, just a figment of his deceptive imagination, but even if there was a man in the business of handing out golden cups of wine, who was to say he’d also be handing out the secrets to Greek cultivation?
The raven had used up all his good fortune early in life. From here on, it would be struggle. Going forward, he knew he couldn’t hope to be given what he desired - what he needed. He would have to take it.
“Are you a Greek at all?” he asked. The raven had assumed that whatever he encountered in this place would be cut from the same cloth as the cult whose rites sent him here, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Aristotle had warned him that true answers to ill-formed questions were at times more detrimental than lies. The Gadfly had hammered into him the practice of asking until the proper question was found.
“I am a son of raging heaven.”
Thunder rumbled in the shadowed grove.
“How did you come to be the man you are today?”
Try, and try again. Until the proper question was found.
“I was born. I’ve lived. Soon enough, I’ll die.”
Another. Substance could be found even in the vagueries of Greek thinkers. As a young man, the raven had scoffed and turned his nose up at the barbarians accepted into his father’s legion when they had leveled that sentiment towards Rome. These days, he empathized with them just a bit. To a Gaul, a Roman’s diction might have seemed nearly as frivolous as a Greek’s was to a Roman. That did not mean they had nothing to say that was worth hearing, though.
“You inherited your strength?”
“What strength?” the man asked, amused. “What have I done that seems strong to you? Offered you a drink and called you greedy?”
The raven considered the words carefully before he spoke them. “The further a man advances, the more he becomes.”
“More of what?”
“Himself. Everything. He becomes greater and more terrible, in a way that can be felt by the world around him. By the Greek standard, a Civic cultivator could stand out in a crowd of a hundred crude souls. A Sophic cultivator could bend the minds of a hundred Citizens. A Heroic cultivator could blind a hundred Philosophers. And a Tyrant could take a hundred Heroes into their hand.”
“And? What comes next?” the man behind pressed him, expectant in the way a parent was expectant of their adolescent child. Amused, knowing they wouldn’t get a proper answer, but willing to be pleasantly surprised. “Who stands above a hundred Tyrants?”
“I don’t know,” the raven named Solus murmured. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”
The man laughed delightedly. The heat on the raven’s back grew hotter.
“You’re making an outrageous assumption, greedy raven. Can you justify it?”
“To a Citizen, a Philosopher is a profound existence,” the raven explained himself, cognizant of the unspoken threat and the fact that his fellow scavenger still hadn’t moved or contributed a word to the conversation. “To a Philosopher, a Hero’s presence is an overwhelming glory. To a Hero, a Tyrant’s focus is an unspeakably heavy burden. The gap between a single realm is substantial enough. If the contrast is greater than that?”
The divide between an unrefined Greek and a newly ascended Philosopher was stark enough for a crude fisherman to offer the bounty of his full day’s work in exchange for a pithy word of advice from a Sophic cultivator. I had experienced for myself the overwhelming pressure of a Tyrant’s unrestrained focus when Damon Aetos had rendered judgment on me the day I arrived in his city. Even shackled and chained, deaf and blind to pneuma, I had felt that weight as a physical thing.
“I am a Philosopher of the first rank,” the raven continued. “I have weathered the ire of barbarian kings and cruel kyrioi, met their disdainful glares with my own and shrugged their notice off my shoulders. But I can’t bring myself to look back while you’re sitting there behind me. Being this close to you burns.”
Whatever it was that sat behind the raven from Rome, it wasn’t a Tyrant.
“True statements,” the man admitted, “But not one of them is proof. If you’re going to make that sort of assumption, you need to prove it. You still haven’t done it.”
He still wasn’t asking the right question.
The raven closed his eyes.
“What is the first virtue?”
The man hummed. In amusement, he answered.
“Fortitude.”
Searing light washed away the shadows of the forest grove, golden rays piercing through the raven’s veil like spearheads and prying into the seams of his eyelids. The raven’s midnight mantle went up in flames, the smell of his own burning hair filling his nostrils. He couldn’t breathe, so he held his breath and throttled the instinctive urge to choke and gag. The raven from Rome burned. He forced himself to bear it.
Forced himself to ask the proper question.
“And what,” he rasped, “is fortitude?”
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“Courage, always. Courage then, courage now, and courage every day thereafter.” With every word, the heat burned more unbearably and the light grew ever brighter. The man didn’t raise his voice because he didn’t have to. Baring the virtue of his soul was enough. Pulling back the veil was already more than the raven’s mortal frame could take. “When all the stars have fallen from the sky, when every father has been buried by their daughter and every son has returned to their mother, fortitude is the virtue of that which remains. Fortitude is that which endures, even when the world is bleak and cold.
“I am that which endures,” he clarified, and the raven hunched in on himself as the fire rose again. He wrapped his burning cloak around himself and tucked his face into his crossed arms. It wasn’t enough to escape the heat. “I am courage in the face of future tragedy. I am the timeless acknowledgement of life’s cruelty and the enjoyment of it in spite. I am fortitude. I am a promise.”
“A promise of what?” The raven couldn’t hear his own voice over the roaring of his own blood in his ears. Fortunately, the man behind him could.
“That no matter how many times I fall, I will rise again tomorrow.”
The sensation of flesh burning and blood boiling in its veins flickered and vanished like a snuffed candle. The raven tensed as the man behind laid a bracing hand on his back. Cool serenity flooded his body from that point of contact, scorched flesh and half-cooked organs mending themselves as quickly as they’d been harmed. The taste of burnt blood faded from his tongue. The stench of his own burning body cleared out of his nostrils. Even still, the raven did not relax until the hand withdrew.
“Some things can’t be inherited,” the man informed him, not unkindly. “Some things can only be taken.”
“How?” the raven asked, though he knew it was the wrong question. He shook his head, frustrated with himself more than any Greek. Beside him, the raven known as Griffon continued to stare sightlessly ahead. His lips were moving, murmuring in a low voice, but the raven couldn’t hear the words. He was uninjured and unphased.
Was it proof that the raven from Rome was the one that had received the ivory cup of lies? Maybe. Was it a quirk of nature, a scarlet son’s immunity to grasping hands of flame? How was he to tell? He had no idea. He had nothing at all. Only his intuition, and a lyre made of ivory lies.
The raven set his golden cup of wine and his cup of ivory or horn on the ground and pulled the instrument from his shadow. He strummed its strings in search of the proper question. The man behind him listened patiently, occasionally humming along as he played. Only when the last chord had been plucked and the music had faded from the grove did he speak.
“You think too much.”
The raven blinked. Of all the reproaches he had come to expect from the sons and daughters of Greece, that one was unique among them.
“I… do?”
“Every age that passes, man understands a bit more of the world, and shackles himself a bit tighter to that understanding. In my time, what you call cultivation, or refinement of the soul, we called living. You’ve tied yourself into a knot, worrying about citizens and philosophers, heroes and tyrants. You are a man before you are any of those things. Live your life, brother. That’s all any of us have to do.”
“It isn’t enough” the raven from Rome immediately denied. “I have to advance. I need to ascend. The world isn’t what it was in your time - what you have, I could never achieve simply by surviving.”
“I didn’t tell you to survive. I told you to live.”
The raven grit his teeth and clenched his ivory lyre so tightly that it began to crack.
“What is the difference?”
“The journey.”
The man behind withdrew for a brief moment, the sound of rummaging cloth and the sensation of receding heat the only signs that the raven could bring himself to perceive. When he spoke again, it was with the Gadfly’s exasperated patience. Aristotle’s merciless honesty. Gaius’ grave expectation.
His father’s concern.
“Seek fulfillment in all things, and you’ll never have to worry whether your cup was carved from ivory or from horn. Decide what it is that defines you, and master them - refine them, and in so doing you will refine yourself. Climb this divine ladder that your ancestors built if you feel you must, but know that it is not necessary to achieve what you desire. A man doesn’t need to be strong to live well.”
“Carthage must be destroyed,” the raven from Rome asserted with his soul, with weight behind every word. “Until I’ve done unto them what they did unto me, I won’t be able to live. Not until I’ve burnt their legions to ash and salted what remains.”
The man behind him sighed.
“Do you know why it is that we call a gathering of ravens an unkindness?”
“No.”
“Because each of you is a grim messenger. You bring about grief and misfortune, always. Whether it’s news of infidelity, the death of family or the loss of a friend, a raven carries only sorrow in its cruel talons.”
“The truth is often cruel.”
“It is,” the faceless man agreed. “And cruelty can be necessary. But in its proper place, and at its proper time. One tragedy is enough to last a man months, years, even a lifetime. A raven on the roof is a reality that no man can avoid forever. We all suffer our own sorrows.
“However.”
For the first time in their brief conversation, the man behind the raven spoke in wrath.
“Anything more beyond that is senseless inhumanity. Carthage wronged you, so you’ll burn them to the ground. Fine. That’s a tragedy, but perhaps a necessary one in the end. But that isn’t where you’ll stop. That isn’t all you’ll do, is it?”
The raven from Rome lifted his chin. He lifted his lip and bared his teeth behind his burnt and twice-blackened veil, though he knew the man behind him couldn’t see it.
“It isn’t. I’ll salt the city that begot them, too, just as they salted mine. I’ll wipe them from this earth and all of its histories.”
“Why?” the man asked, though he already knew.
“So nothing can ever grow there again.”
The same tanned arm as before reached out, into his peripheral vision, and placed a second golden cup of wine next to the first.
“An eye for an eye.” He sounded disappointed.
“No.”
Tragedy for tragedy wasn’t enough. An eye for an eye was too little. Vengeance for himself was only a fraction of what was owed. The raven’s name was Solus.
He was all that remained.
“I am Roman, and I am Greek,” he said, the realization stirring his soul. His pneuma rose. “My story is not mine alone. I am a man, and I am three thousand men as well. I am one, and I am legion.”
Alone, a grim messenger. But together?
“I am a raven. And I am an unkindness.”
Driven by the weight of an ideal, a principle discovered and internalized, the raven advanced.
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The raven known to some as Lio Aetos and to others as Griffon blinked and abruptly turned away from the delusions of his dream as his brother’s pneuma surged. Doubling and redoubling again. Advancing from the first stage of the Sophic Realm to the second, to join him on the twelfth step.
His heart lightened. Joy banished the false Heroes from the corners of his eyes. He turned to regard his brother.
“Worthless Roman, it took you long enough-”
His breath caught in his throat.