Selene
Cultivators had a reputation for fearlessness.
In many ways, it was well-earned. In the course of their journey, a cultivator’s refinement steadily uplifted them body and soul in a way that put most common worries beneath them. An unrefined mortal feared the bite of a knife because they knew their body was a fragile thing and prone to failure. A cultivator in the Civic Realm could hone their body and suffer the damage gracefully, survive long enough to seek a physician or even close the wound themselves if they had the proper control. A Sophic cultivator worth their rank could survive almost any mundane gouge, assuming the knife could pierce their skin at all.
Beyond the mortal realms of cultivation, where men and women transcended the limitations of their feeble humanity - if only in the smallest of parts - mundane wounds were so far beneath their notice that many forgot they had ever been a cause for concern in the first place. Why should a Hero fear a stabbing in a back alley, when their body had already weathered the blows of monsters and virtuous beasts and their own fellow legends without faltering? How could a Tyrant fear the stopping of their heart, when they had already given it up for their coronation?
It was all too easy to forget that even the greatest of them had been fragile flesh and blood at one point or another in their lives. As a man became further refined, it became more and more difficult for him to empathize with the concerns of the crude men languishing at the foot of the divine mountain. As a woman laid the foundations and raised the pillars of her ego within her soul, the subjugations that unrefined women crept through night time streets in fear of seemed as distant to her as the clouds in heaven above.
They simply didn’t understand. The scope was too small.
Of course, the opposite also tended to be true.
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“The daughter of the First Son to Burn is afraid of the dark. The daughter of the oracle whose majesty illuminates the furthest corners of whatever room she steps into fears a world without light. The Fates do love their little ironies, don’t they?”
“You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”
“And look. I’m not laughing, am I? Now, if I’d been there to see your father spit blood when he first discovered this little affliction-“
“It isn’t little! And Átta doesn’t know.”
“Ho? He really will choke on his own biles if he finds out you came to me first, you know.”
“You can’t tell him.”
“I can do whatever I want, girl.”
“Don’t tell him! Please!”
“Fine, fine. Your heart will be the one to bear the secret’s weight. Now why did you come to me with this?”
“I didn’t… I didn’t used to be afraid of the dark.”
“Is that so? And when did it start?”
“After your bee stung me. When I started having those dreams.”
“Go on.”
“You said treating it with honey would make it go away-“
“And it did. All that remains of that putrid wound is a scar the size of a stinger’s tip.”
“But the dreams didn’t stop! They only got worse.”
“Worse?”
“They didn’t make sense before, b-but after the honey… they’re scary now.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t like it.”
“Describe them.”
“No!”
“Why?”
“Because I hate them! They’re scary, and they hurt! I don’t want to talk about them, and I don’t want to think about them - I don’t want to go to sleep and I don’t want to close my eyes! I-I’m even scared to blink! Like I’m just some little girl-”
“You are a little girl.”
“No I’m not! I’m a cultivator. I’m refined. I shouldn’t have to talk about these things. I shouldn’t be afraid of anything at all.”
“Cultivators can’t be afraid? Is that what you think?”
“Átta isn’t afraid of anything.”
“I can assure you that isn’t true. Everyone fears something in the end - even your father.”
“Even you?”
“Even me.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“An empty cup. Quickly, girl, deliver me from my fear. When you get back, we’ll see about delivering you from yours.”
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Fallen into a world of unbroken shadows, Selene couldn’t see the Hero of the Scything Squall. But she could hear him.
It was less helpful than it might have been.
“Get away,” he hissed, and though the sound of it came from her direct right, Selene only grasped empty air when her arm whipped out to grab him.
“Scythas,” she hissed right back, knowing that even if she was facing the opposite way he would hear her. “You aren’t well. Let me help you.”
“Fuck you.”
She had been foolish to toss him down into the coffin’s dark chasm. The impact at the end of their fall hadn’t been enough to meaningfully harm cultivators of their standing, but it had been enough to wake the delirious Hero from the daze her headbutt had put him under. In the bare second that had separated their descent, he’d escaped from her reach and evaded her ever since.
Her heart’s flame couldn’t pierce these shadows. And now the wind was against her, too. She was blind. Worse, she couldn’t trust her ears. Until this was over, her other senses would have to do. Before they could help Solus and Griffon, they needed to escape. Before they could escape, she had to return the Hero to his senses.
She needed honey.
Selene navigated the dark caverns beneath the earth with the only senses she could trust. She cast off her sandals so that her bare feet could grip the cool, slick rocks beneath them and feel their minute shifting as she walked. She inhaled deeply with each breath, through her mouth as well as her nose, tasting and scenting for anything beyond the damp smell of subterranean stone. Her refined senses were all but worthless to her, unfortunately. Her civic sense for pneuma was curiously numb, her sophic sense finding no trace of another’s influence no matter how far she cast it out.
As for her heroic sense. Well.
“Don’t look at me,” the Hero snapped, shielding his cracked and bleeding heart from her with howling gales of wind. Selene tucked her chin and hunched her shoulders, gripping the slick stone with her toes as best she could while the breeze buffeted her from alternating angles. It sought to knock her off her feet. She wouldn’t let it.
“Your heart is not your own, cultivator,” she warned him for the second time since she had known him. She couldn’t hear herself speak, but she knew he would. She grit her teeth and pressed forward. Another blind step. Another deep breath.
“It’s yours now, is that it?” Scythas spat, his voice echoing from all around her. “I refuse. You can’t have it. You can’t have me.”
Selene heard the screams of violated souls on the wind. She heard the whistle of blades cutting through the air, and the grotesque noise of their impact in frail human flesh. She heard the snarls of beasts and the sound of limbs being torn from their sockets. She heard anguish in the repetition of heavy breath and the rhythm of flesh impacting flesh.
She heard the end of all things in the howling of the wind.
Selene didn’t fear the dark. Not anymore.
But she still despised it.
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“The dark is a silly thing to fear.”
“Not as silly as an empty cup.”
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“Ah, but you don’t know why I fear an empty cup. I, on the other hand, know exactly why you fear the dark. That’s why I find it silly. And that’s how you overcome your fear.”
“?”
“By understanding it. You say your dreams don’t make any sense, and their contents frighten you - so understand them.”
“How?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re useless!”
“So I’m told. If understanding is impossible for the moment, there are other ways to overcome your fears.”
“Like what?”
“You could learn to live with them. Accept that your heart will race whenever you close your eyes, resign yourself every night to the fact that your dreams will be mad and frightening things. Know that cold sweat will wet your skin whenever you step into a darkened room. Brave it. Live your life regardless.”
“… I don’t like that way.”
“Well, I suppose there is another.”
“… What is it?”
“You can take your fear in hand. You can consume it.”
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You can make it yours.
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Selene tripped over a shaft of warm wood. She inhaled sharply, and the sweet scent of honey filled her nose. Its sweet tang coated her tongue.
The daughter of the Scarlet Oracle picked up her spear and pulled from its tip the beehive that she had skewered when she’d thrown it.
“I’m going to mend you now, cultivator,” she explained in a calm voice. Howling wind mingled with the echoing death throes of the fallen sun god in her ears. She closed her eyes and every one of her other senses, gripping her spear tight.
The pantheon was dead and gone. That was plain to see in every faceless statue and stricken holy text. Only epitaphs remained in place of names. Only echoes could be heard these days, even by an oracle.
But an echo of divinity was still itself divine.
As a woman both healthy and whole, Selene had five senses with which she could perceive the world. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. They were all useless here. As a cultivator in the third realm, the Heroic Realm, she had three additional senses that she could use, each of them more refined than the last. They were useless as well.
As an Oracle, if only by blood, she had one more beyond that. An echo of a dead god’s perception. Another eye that stayed closed at all times. Unless, of course, she gave it a reason to open.
Selene bit into the beehive and swallowed down its chthonic honey. Her oracle’s eye cracked open a sliver.
She spun on her heel and lunged, spearing Scythas through the heart.
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“Bakkhos.”
“That’s my name.”
“I have a question.”
“You usually do.”
“I lost another one today. A man twice my age and three times my size. He clung to my legs like I was his mother and begged me for an answer to his troubles while his insides tore themselves apart. He wanted me to cure him. He died.”
“Tragic.”
“Father told me it wasn’t my fault. It’s what he always tells me. ‘An oracle is only a messenger, Selene. It’s no fault of yours that some people need a mending far more than they need a message.’”
“I have yet to hear a question asked.”
“Years ago, you told me that I could take my fear in hand. You taught me that I could make it my own.”
“I did.”
“What about someone else’s fear? Their grief and their sorrows? Can I take those, too?”
“I’ve never seen it done.”
“So it’s impossible.”
“I didn’t say that.”
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The gates of horn groaned and creaked open, and they tumbled out into the frigid Thracian night.
Scythas sank into the snow, staring up at the full moon above. His arms and neck were marred by angry red welts, each of them slathered in honey that shimmered gold in the pale moonlight. He had a satisfied smile on his face. It had been his abilities that guided them out in the end. He’d traced the familiar Thracian winds through the darkened underworld, all the way to their source - seeping through the cracks in the horn gates.
His eyes were clear, the flames within them burning brighter than they had at any point thus far in their Thracian venture. Those eyes flickered to her, wonder and appreciating brightening them further.
“What did you do to me?”
Selene raised an eyebrow. The Hero chuckled, pressing a palm to his forehead and shaking his head once.
“Right. What did you do for me?”
“I applied honey to your bee stings.” Apitherapy. The late kyrios’ favorite form of medicine, and the same method he’d used to treat her own bee sting so many years ago.
“That can’t be all,” Scythas said, clenching and unclenching his free hand into a fist and lifting his hips to kick idly at the night sky. “I don’t just feel like I did before. I feel better. I haven’t felt this good in my entire life. I feel like-”
“Like yourself.”
He snapped his fingers and smiled. “Exactly.”
Selene watched him sadly as he marveled at something that should have been a simple reality for him.
“I feel light as a feather,” he continued, twisting his body to and fro and whistling a little note that caught the falling snowflakes in the air and twisted them around in a dozen different strands of wind currents. “I feel good. Strong, and healthy.”
Like a hero.
“The honey will heal the welts,” Selene informed him, because she couldn’t bear the sight any longer. She had to tell him the truth of things. “But the rest of what you’re feeling is temporary. If you carry on as you did before, it will fade. You’ll go back to what you were before. It might be worse than before, knowing how far you’ve fallen from what you could be.”
The Hero Scythas sat straight up, panic warring with his good mood. “What? Why?”
Selene considered the moon above. The snowflakes as they whirled, each one a unique wonder.
“When was the last time you advanced, cultivator?” she asked him softly.
“… two years ago. From the tenth rank of the Sophic Realm to the first rank of the Heroic Realm.”
“Two years ago. And tell me, Scythas of the Scything Squall - was your ascension triumphant?”
“No,” he whispered.
It was said that tragedy was an inevitability in the course of a Hero’s journey. All that changed from legend to legend was whether that tragedy struck at the end of their Epic.
Or the beginning.
“Then it’s good you haven’t advanced since then.”
“Why?”
She hummed, running her fingers up and down the carved prophecies that decorated her spear. “Cultivation makes us more of what we already are. Good as well as bad. The further we refine ourselves, the more wondrous we seem to those that stand beneath us. Beyond a certain point, we grow larger than the largest non-cultivator could ever hope to be. We become stronger, and more beautiful, and wiser beyond the years of any mortal soul. But with triumph comes tragedy. And those pains advance alongside us just the same.”
A mortal man humiliated and ridiculed in the middle of a crowded agora might feel as if his world was falling out from under his feet, like his heart would hammer out of his chest at any moment, but in reality the worst that shame could generally do was invoke a cold sweat. Perhaps if the blow had truly cut him deep, it might ruin his appetite along with his mood.
A cultivator’s shame, like all the rest of their soul, was more than a non-cultivator’s. Their shame could do more than ruin their appetite and make them sweat. They could spit blood like they’d been run through with a sword if another’s words hit their ego in just the right place, at just the right time, among just the right people.
“You are standing in a dangerous place,” she informed him with as much weight as she could impart. She tried to make him understand. “The most dangerous place, in some ways. Every rank we advance, we become more than what we were before. Advancing through a realm, though - that adds more than just a layer to our soul. It deepens us. It makes us exponentially greater. And it makes our deviations exponentially more terrible.
“I’ve glimpsed a portion of what torments you,” she admitted, an apology as much as a confession. She’d had no choice. Once she stepped into another’s heart, their demons had a way of divulging things they would never speak to on their own. She could only nod at the panic and the shame that overtook the Hero as he realized what she had seen. “I’ve excised what I could from your heart, but I can’t reach the roots. I can’t stop it from growing back, more terrible than it was before. That’s something only you can do.”
Scythas swallowed. “And if I don’t?”
Selene closed her eyes. The constellations above were familiar to her, but subtly off. They had escaped the Orphic House’s ivory delusions, but they had not returned to the world in the same place that they had left it. The land around them looked like Thracia, but it wasn’t any portion of it that Selene had seen before.
“A deviation of the soul is what we call it when a cultivator loses their way. When we go against the truths and ideals that made us who we are, when we betray the desires and the deeds that drove us to the heights we so enjoy looking down from, we stray. And there are evils that lurk along the path to heaven.
“A Hero’s heart is what sets them apart from those both above and below them. For better and for worse. In triumph as well as tragedy. Standing at the nexus of refinement where one realm meets another is dangerous regardless of where exactly you stand - you have become something deeper than you were before, and you don’t yet fully understand what that means. Your woes are deeper in a way that you can’t grasp until they’ve sank their fangs into you. Luckily for you, your woes haven’t gotten their bearings yet either.”
“What are you saying?” Scythas asked her, frightened and confused. “You’re talking about my trauma like it’s a living thing, as if it can think and plot against me.”
She smiled bleakly. “I call them heart demons.”
“You call them what?”
Selene raised the chthonic hive to her lips without opening her eyes and took another bite out of its honeycombs. Her oracle eyes cracked open, just a sliver, and gazed upon the heavens above. Ah. The gates of horn had spit them out further afield than she’d thought.
“Then you’re saying,” Scythas began, the spark of divinity within his soul contorting in on itself in its confusion, “that… that once the demon understands its strength, it’ll use it? Against me?”
“The second most dangerous tribulation a cultivator faces is in the transcendence of realms,” she recited, a lesson she had learned years ago. A lesson she had seen reflected in dozens of pitiful men and women, groveling at a girl’s feet in search of salvation. “Whether it’s a tribulation of lightning or something else entirely, citizen to sophist, sophist to hero, hero to tyrant - the chasm is endlessly deep and the leap that must be made to cross it is perilously long.”
“And the most dangerous?” Scythas asked quietly, though he already knew.
She answered anyway. “The very next one. From the first rank to the second.”
In every realm of cultivation, the most common ranks for a cultivator’s journey to end at were the first and the last.
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In a shadowed grove of Orphic mystery, the hungry raven known as Solus advanced to the second rank of the Sophic Realm-
And choked as a hand rose up from his shadow and clamped its fingers around his throat.
The hungry raven known as Griffon lunged across the grove, reaching out for the Roman while he snarled and fought his own shadow. A dozen more arms reached up from Solus’ shadow and gripped his head, his shoulders, and his arms. Pulling him. Dragging him down.
The raven from Rome sank into his own shadow.
He vanished.