The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Niko stared at the burning nightmare that had once been Olympia's dock town, and not for the first time, he wondered where it was he’d strayed.

Close to the clouds with their feet planted firmly on the deck of the Alikonia - higher than they would have been in the crow's nest of the Eos - they had a commanding view of the wreckage. With vision refined by principle and passion, their eyes could see more than even the most gifted mortal. For once, that awareness was a curse more than it was a comfort. The clarity only made the sight of everything all worse. No matter how much he wished it would be so, Niko couldn’t overlook the broken corpses, no more than he could remain blind to the molten scar in the earth that led all the way back to the smoking city just over the horizon.

Niko’s wife shuddered in his arms, her sleeping face twisting in agony. Iphys Aetos was tormented, even in her dreams, by a pain that Niko couldn’t comprehend. No matter what he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to cleanse the sudden agony that had struck her down in the light of that stark pillar. Their companions had been every bit as impotent when they’d tried. Only Archimedes had been able to accomplish anything, and even then his tonic had only been able to put her to sleep.

It was silent on the deck but for his wife’s tortured sleeping sounds. The Heroes were trying to make sense of it all, and he could tell without words that they were failing miserably. Even the Sand Reckoner's stick of charcoal had ceased its scratching motion. Archimedes looked out over the burning waves, not with shock or dismay, but with a weary old disgust.

His cousins…

Niko rose to his feet, his unconscious wife cradled in his arms. "I’m going."

"Are you out of your mind?" Roxane demanded. Out of reflex more than anything, if Niko had to guess.

"Why bother asking when you know the answer’s yes?" Bardas replied, though the words lacked their normal teasing bite. The reformed reaver looked questioningly from Niko to the woman in his arms. "Though… you’re sure you want to bring her?"

"Why bother asking?" Thaum threw the pirate's words back in his face as Niko leapt from the deck.

Three followed. His younger cousins protested and tried to follow him across the burning waves, but three remained behind to hold them back. Niko hardened his heart against their pleas - they were too close to this wasteland as it was.

Their party moved inland, cautiously at first, then faster and faster as the grim sight grew worse. Faster, past the molten glassed beaches. Faster, through the uprooted fir forests. Faster, until they were sprinting at full speed through a dozen painted stages of tragedy. Niko held his wife tight against his chest, distantly wondering if the pounding of his heart would wake her, and searched for hope in vain. There was nothing left standing. There was no one left alive.

"What is this?" Roxane swung her head, blood-red hair flying back and forth.

"Who would dare-?"

"Forget daring, who would be capable? The kyrios wouldn’t let an invading force do half this much damage before he wiped them out. No. It’s not who, it’s what."

"’What?’ You think this happened naturally? There are no fire mountains here. What sort of hurricane or tornado turns beaches to glass and rivers to flame? What sort of earthquake splits fertile earth and makes it bleed magma?"

"Gods damn you, I wasn’t talking about the weather! Beasts! Monsters.”

“Who's talking about monsters now of all times, when the Olympic Stadium is bursting at the seams with contenders? Unless it was Typhon himself-"

“...”

"Unless it was."

"... Niko. What do you think?"

Niko thought the Fates were never kind.

Their first glimpse of the Father’s temple seemed almost like a mirage, so out of place was it among its surroundings. The ancient wonder of the world stood alone, intact where everything else had been broken down or uprooted. Yet there it was, as proud as it had ever been.

There was no one inside, living or dead. Niko stopped just long enough to whisper a quiet prayer to the chryselephantine monument of the Father before continuing on. On, across the countryside separating Olympia proper from its western dock town. On, along the scattered remains of the red clay road that Niko had once walked as a bright-eyed philosopher. On to the sanctuary city. On to the free world’s beating heart.

On to what remained.

Niko’s brothers and sisters-in-arms wavered, staggered, fell to their knees.

Niko stared blankly at the corpse of the Half-Step City, unable to make sense of it all.

He reached out with his sharpest perceptions, cutting through the rubble, the smoke, and the relentless pounding rain in search of something. Anything. The voice of his better judgment was all but deafening. Reason told him that whatever this was, whatever it had been, a first-rank Philosopher and a ninth-rank Citizen had better chances swimming across the Styx than they did surviving a calamity of this kind. If Niko found his cousins here, he knew he’d likely find them crumpled corpses.

Niko cast those thoughts aside. He'd been wrong about his cousins since he came home for his wedding. Surely he could be wrong here, too. Just one more time, and he would never take their lives for granted again. Let him be wrong again. Let the Fates be kind for once.

When he finally found a survivor in the smoke, he leapt over the rubble of Olympia’s broken walls without hesitation. His companions followed close behind.

The survivor was not a sturdy young soul, nor an old adept. She was just old. They found the old woman kneeling at the edge of the molten scar carved out of the city, as if it was a river like any other and she had come to fill her jug. She was covered in soot and muck, her arms stained up to her elbows with dried blood. Yet even as the city burned around her, even as the shawls pooling around her on the ground blackened and caught flame, she went about her work unchanged.

"Old woman-!"

"Get back from there!"

"You’ll burn."

Niko put himself between the crone and his companions, lest they yank her bodily from the molten river bank. He crouched down beside her, carefully, shielding his wife from the slow-rolling heat of the river.

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"Grandmother," he greeted the old woman quietly. "What are you doing?"

"What does it seem like I’m doing, young man?"

Niko watched her peel away another scrap of soot-stained cloth and drop it into the molten river. All the while, her expression remained as placid as still water. As though she was somewhere else entirely.

"It seems like you’re mourning," Niko answered.

The old woman’s lips cracked and bled when she smiled.

"Oh yes. At my age, I do little else."

"Who are you mourning now?"

The old woman cast another shawl into the river and watched it sink beneath the molten flame. Her eyes were dry, but her fingers trembled as they worked to peel another from her shoulders.

"Among others, my fool husband," she answered. "A thousand times I told him his optimism would get him killed someday, and a thousand times he ignored me. Today I won that argument. The last one that we’ll ever have."

"I’m sorry," Niko said. The old widow scoffed.

"Don’t be. He wasn’t."

"What happened to him?" Niko swept his eyes over what remained of Olympia. In the distance, the mountain under Raging Heaven glowed a sullen indigo, lit by shining amethyst veins. "What happened to this place? What did this?"

"Who did this," the crone corrected him.

THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.

Niko closed his eyes and silently prayed. "Where is the kyrios?"

"In a grave, I imagine. He died this past winter."

Thaum sucked in soot as if he’d been punched in the gut. Roxane covered her mouth with both hands, aghast, while Bardas hissed a quiet curse.

"Who took his place?" Niko asked, though he didn’t want to know.

The old widow dropped another shawl into the flames.

"We’ll find out soon enough."

Niko shot to his feet. Steam seethed out from between his teeth, mingling with the soot and rain.

In the distance, the exposed veins of Kaukoso Mons’ tribulation amethyst flashed a blinding white in response to a terrible outpouring of hunger and malice. The dread aura of a tyrant unfurled across the ruined city, like the blooming petals of a lily. It was a frail presence. Crippled at its core, Niko realized as his senses brushed against it.

A heartbeat passed, and it was less frail than it had been before.

Thaum tensed, staring at the distant mountain.

Bardas’ precious metal bracelets jangled as he palmed a dagger. "That’s-"

"Old ‘Zalus," Roxane whispered.

The Olympia that Niko remembered had been a place of plenty that went beyond decadence. The sanctuary city had been an impossibility built on an unshakable foundation of overindulgence, a gathering of cultures that could not have hoped to share the same streets anywhere else on this earth. It had existed peacefully for centuries only because the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult had decided it would be so. It had stood as a sanctuary above all safe places, despite the monsters that it kept in flimsy cages and the feuds that it encouraged, because the Tyrant Riot would not accept any other outcome.

In the absence of such a unifying force, what was the worst possible outcome?

The city of Olympia was a bastion of trade, the only truly neutral territory in the Free Mediterranean. On any given day, it housed statesmen and pioneers of industry from all over the known world. In the weeks leading up to the Olympic games, they’d have flocked here like fair-weather falcons. Beyond that, there was the mountain and its storm crown, home to the Raging Heaven Cult. Eight tyrants left to rule amongst themselves, to split the late kyrios’ authority evenly among themselves or to invest it all in one.

What was the result?

Niko shifted his wife in his arms and took the hilt of his sword in hand - with a sharp twist of his wrist, snapped it off the blade. He wrapped his fingers tight around the blade’s tang, and his heart’s flame burned bright.

The crone tutted and smacked his shin. "I have enough corpses to bury. Don’t burden me with more."

"I wouldn’t dream of it, Grandmother," he told the crone quietly. His pneuma rose steadily in time with the Tyrant's dread authority. It was still weak, and Niko had time enough to burn.

"This isn’t a fight we should be picking at half mast," Bardas warned, ever the paradoxical voice of reason in their crew.

"I agree." Thaum stepped up beside Niko, the hulking pankrator’s anticipation rolling off of him in boiling waves. He grinned viciously at the bright beacon of the mountain. "Fortunately, the Blade and I alone are worth more here than the rest of you together."

They bristled and snapped at one another, retreading familiar arguments and sinking into the comfort of pre-battle routines. There was no time for it.

"He won’t be weak for long," Niko spoke. His companions fell silent to listen. In his free arm, Iphys moaned and thrashed. Grief and wrath made Niko’s voice frigid. "We strike him down now, before it’s too late."

"No," the hushed voice of the Glorifier whispered in his ear. The goddess of great deeds and histories kept, the Muse who carried the name Clio, pressed her head up under his chin. The comet-bright strands of her hair tickled his cheeks as they swayed. "That time is gone already."

The colors on the mountain, the pallor of its veins, began to change. Beneath their feet and above their heads, as well as in the shifting rubble all around them, Olympia bucked and fought like a stallion against the reins. On a scale that went beyond a mortal man’s understanding, the Half-Step City struggled against the incursion of a new authority.

It lost.

Niko’s heart beat once, and the distant aura of dread Polyzalus doubled and redoubled in strength. The vitality of the earth and the bounty of the rain falling from on high twisted and funneled towards the mountain, bolstering the man that held the reins. Before their eyes, Polyzalus of Burning Dusk took the city of Olympia in his hand.

"Nothing changes," Niko declared, sweeping his blade around. From his beating heart down to his white-knuckled fingers, defiance flowed into the tang of his blade without an imperfect hilt to obstruct it. Its edge severed one of the unfurling lily petals fully from the flower, taking a chunk out of the newly risen Tyrant. From the depths of the distant mountain, there came a bellow like quaking earth. "Nothing ends but him. We fight! We win! For the innocence that died. For the heroes that gave their lives-!"

Niko’s breath caught. From the pit of the distant Olympic stadium, the light of a living cultivator reared up and cast off the reins of Olympia’s new authority. The Cradle of Champions gave rise to a new contender, as it always had.

But it was wrong.

What flooded from between the statues of old olympic champions was not the light of burning glory, but the heavy pressure of authority. The new contender threw off Polyzalus’ reins, only to lash its own around the spiral colonnades of the Olympic Stadium. Claiming it for itself. Establishing its place as victor above victors, this spot upon the earth its land alone to rule. A domain all its own.

A newborn tyrant staked his claim upon the Olympic stadium and roared a challenge at the distant mountain, as well as the shining stars above.

"Niko!" Roxane cried out above the tumult as the authority of two tyrants clashed. "It’s too much!"

"We can win!" Thaum shouted, though his grin had turned to a defiant snarl.

"What do we do!? Niko!"

His heart told him they could win. But that accursed voice of reason filled his mind in that moment with thoughts of his defenseless wife, still suffering in his arms. It hounded him with thoughts of Lio and of little Myron, bleeding out alone while he fought for a city that had already fallen before his arrival. Thoughts of Lydia, Caster, and Rena, waiting unaware back on the ship, within range of a tyrant's errant wrath.

Conflicted to his roots, Niko wavered on the edge of his blade.

"Young man, you worry too much," the crone said, not unkindly. She patted his sandaled foot and favored him with a matronly smile. Civic cultivator that she was, her wrinkled skin had already begun to bruise at the runoff pressure of the two Tyrants clashing.

Still, she offered him her wisdom.

"Courage isn’t always found at the end of a blade. You have to save yourself before you save the world."

Niko thought of his cousins gathered around the night fire. Happy and whole, together as one.

"Save them," the crone urged him.

Niko turned his back on the fight.

"Get back to the ship. Go!" They followed him without question, even Thaum, and raced back the way they’d come.

Kneeling in the shadow of a grim ascension, the old woman tossed another shawl into the flames.