Old ‘Zalus

The room was large but modestly furnished, barren by the standards of most made men. Its floors were polished marble, pure and unblemished by gemstone veins. What furniture that there was, a massive cypress bed frame and side tables of the same wood, was all finely kept but notable for its lack of adornment. There were no paintings, no statues or sacred treasures. It was as humble a home as any man could have.

And yet, that did not change what it was. The lack of overt majesty made it no less potent. No less his. The response to intruders here was just the same as in the most palatial estate.

“I’m going to kill you, Gadfly,” Polyzalus promised the man intruding upon his place. It was an insult that no tyrant worth their title would tolerate. After all.

A Tyrant’s domain was the throne of their soul.

“Good evening to you too, Zalus,” Socrates said, brushing the weight of a Tyrant’s displeasure off his shoulders. “I’ve come to bargain.”

The Gadfly, pest among pests, strode into Polyzalus’ domain as brazenly as he did everything else, passing by the bed and side tables without a second glance on his way to the wide open terrace. That he didn’t hesitate even for a moment is the only reason Polyzalus didn’t kill him where he stood.

But the urge was strong. It always was.

“I have nothing to give you, and you have never had anything worth wanting,” the tyrant dismissed the philosopher.

Idly, in another place and another part of himself, the Rein-Holder listened through the ears of his faithful shadows as they left to do their dark work. These aspects of himself, the shards of the Tyrant that was Scarlet Polyzalus, existed in his perception in the same way that the shadows they epitomized did. Silhouettes without true detail. Impressions and whispered half-truths.

It was enough to know when his crows were on the hunt. The rest would be revealed to him when the shadows of himself were re-gathered to the whole. Assuming, of course, that they were not devoured first.

“Fortunately for the both of us, nothing is exactly what I came here to bargain for,” Socrates said, sitting cross legged on the marble floor with his back to the stone rails of the terrace.

“Deal, then. Now leave.”

“That’s no way to treat a guest.”

Polyzalus paused in his work, and in his far seeing as well, and leveled the Gadfly with the pressure of his authority. Socrates met his eyes just long enough to make his worthless point before allowing his head to bow.

“You haven’t been my guest in over three hundred years,” the true tyrant of the Burning Dusk said, and his conviction made it so. Within these plain walls and upon this marble floor, the word of the First-to-Burn was natural law.

And yet Socrates found it within himself to reach outside of that new natural order, and make a nuisance of himself as always.

“What would our father in heaven think, to hear you cast aside xenia so callously?”

Night was falling, casting shadows in the room. Polyzalus reached out with the crystallized purpose of his ravenous soul and from nothing declared something, burning out of non-existence several sunset lanterns that drifted like fireflies into his domain. With his hands, he dipped an unstained cloth into a basin of water and twisted it, gently ringing out the bulk of the moisture.

“There are no gods left to punish such things,” he said, taking her arm in his hand and setting to his work with the damp cloth.

“Is that so? Is that what you truly believe?”

“Near enough.”

These days, it made little difference.

“Then disregard the pantheon,” Socrates said, unwinding sash after sash from around himself and casting them to the wind. “What would you think, three hundred years ago, to see yourself now? To hear your own voice uttering such foul sentiment?”

“I wouldn’t think anything meaningful at all. I never did, in those days.”

“If not the gods, and not the you of yesterday, then is the you of today truly the sole arbiter of morality? How can you know that the ‘Zalus of tomorrow won’t disagree? If all the world tells you-”

“Not today,” Polyzalus said simply, and leveraged the weight of his purpose. Outside of his domain, he would have had to manifest his pneuma for this. But here, seated upon the humble throne of his soul, all he had to do was desire it.

And it was his.

The Gadfly shut his mouth, and it was worth every ounce of ethos that Polyzalus had invoked to achieve it. He dipped his cloth back in the basin of water, wringing it once more.

Alas, it didn’t last. “I’ll be brief, then.”

“Will you?” The first son to burn mused, brushing back golden hair the same shade as his own and wetting her forehead. “Even in my own domain, I never thought I’d see the day.”

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“I’ve taken on a boy.”

He sneered. “Spare me your personal details.”

“I’ll be overseeing his development for the near future, so expect to see him around the Raging Heaven. I don’t want him pulled into the current schemes.”

The damp cloth stilled, resting against her right cheek.

“What is his name?”

“He calls himself Solus. But his companion calls him Sol.”

Polyzalus glanced back at the arrogant Gadfly. “You’re tempting the Fates, boy.”

Socrates scoffed, amused. “Three decades difference aren’t what they used to be. We’re both old men these days - it’s only that I choose to look it.”

“Those children took a bite out of my influence,” Polyzalus explained, because the world was a strange place, and he had known wiser men to be less informed about more obvious things in the past. “They perverted the nature of my shades and used their stolen strength to do the same to my peers. Even if I were to grant them clemency, the others wouldn’t.” Especially when these hungry ravens had thwarted all attempts to bring their lost Heroes in line.

Tyrants were greedy existences. It was already the case that they hungered beyond any satiation. Anything that strove to take even more from them would face the same fate regardless of whose heels they were nipping at. What else could a starving lion do when provoked by a scavenger?

“What makes you think that the boys I’m referring to are the same ones tearing down your crows?” Socrates pressed, with his veiled curiosity. He reached out with his poisonous logos, as if Polyzalus couldn’t see it written in the stars between them.

“I don’t think. I know.”

He watched with a dim sort of mirth as the logos strengthened, coiled in on itself in preparation. And then he waved his influence through it, brushing it off like sand from his shoulder, and headed off the argument before it could be made.

“You can run your circles all you want in the agora, but not here. Not right now. And especially not in front of my wife.” Three times he asserted himself within his domain, and three times it was made so.

He dipped his cloth into the shimmering basin once more, and returned to his duty. In the fine feather bed, his wife continued to sleep her dreamless sleep.

“I came here intending to be civil,” Socrates said, scowling now, and reached into a fold in logic disguised as cloth, pulling from it a jug of fine kykeon. The smell of it permeated Polyzalus’ domain, and he knew it was no coincidence that this was the exact blend he had served a young man in search of understanding over three hundred years ago. Back when he ruled in the Scarlet City.

Back when the setting sun belonged to him.

“How can a scholar be anything less than civil in the presence of a king?” Polyzalus mused. “But so be it. I’ll humor you - where do you intend to keep this boy?”

“It just so happens that an estate has been made vacant recently,” Socrates said, shrugging and taking a pull from the wine jug himself. He swallowed easily, savoring the taste.

Then he grimaced in fleeting unease as Polyzalus burnt Courage from his soul.

“What?”

“I gave the boy a place to learn some sense away from prying eyes - and the presumptions of men that think they know best.”

The damp cloth burnt to ash in his hands, and the ash burnt soon after. Outside of the bedroom, to the furthest edges of his domain, members of the Burning Dusk cult faction within Olympia dropped anything and everything they were doing and moved. Whether that was to rush towards them or away depended on the individual.

Of course, he’d seen Socrates bring the boy to the kyrios’ estate in the heart of Kaukoso Mons. It wasn’t an act outside of the Gadfly’s usual privileges, confidant that he had been to the late lord of the Raging Heaven Cult. But refuge for the night was one thing, and prolonged accommodation was entirely another. “You intend to keep him there? In the heart of the mountain where the Oracles sleep? With my daughter?”

He had promised murder when the Gadfly first walked in, and countless times before today. Perhaps after all these years he’d finally make good on that promise.

Socrates raised both hands, with some effort, against his ethos. And he spoke. “I brought no ravens to your doorstep, I can promise you that. Only a boy with more potential than sense. Your daughter is as she’s always been. Safe and secure.”

“And why should I take you at your word? Why should I accept a young fool’s resolve over my own?”

Socrates matched logos to ethos, as he always had, and the sight was as absurd as it had been the very first time.

“Because you’re all balancing on the knife’s edge, and even a young fool’s word could be the difference that places one of you above the rest. And unlike your peers, who are each trying to decide which path best suits their greed, you don’t have a choice.”

Socrates spread his hands and offered up the truth of Polyzalus’ world as he understood it.

“The others can decide. They can go home and reclaim what was theirs before the kyrios took them from it, or they can stay and fight for what the kyrios left behind. But not you, ‘Zalus. The only way out for you is through. Nothing remains of you in the Scarlet City. No one is waiting for you there.”

No one but Damon Aetos.

Rage warped the sunset domain for a single micro instant. In the time it took him to reclaim himself, every soul in the Burning Dusk wing of the Raging Heaven Cult dropped to the ground, their eyes and ears leaking blood. The only one spared was his wife. As always, courage wrapped her in its tight embrace.

“The world is on the brink of being a violent place once again,” he finally said, the tightly leashed fury in his voice cracking the marble beneath their feet. “I won’t tolerate another threat to my ethos.”

“I’ll keep them in line,” Socrates promised. Them. So he sought to include the other hungry raven in his protection. Polyzalus stared him down, stared through him, sifted through the light of his soul and didn’t find a single answer that satisfied him.

“You said you’d never take on another student,” he finally said, reaching into empty air and grasping the jug of wine that Socrates had brought in offering. He drank deeply from it, remembering simpler times. “What changed?”

Socrates sighed.

“Nothing at all.”

Polyzalus finished the wine in two more pulls and dismissed the jug from his domain. He turned away from the philosopher, back to his wife.

“Swear to me they won’t take another bite out of my influence, and know that if either of them advances on my daughter I’ll tear their mortal threads from the loom and eat their beating hearts.”

“I swear. And I understand.”

Polyzalus waved an irritated hand. “Fine. Do what you will.”

The Gadfly always did.