0.22 [PROLOGUE END]

Nothing was ever simple.

“Lio?”

Griffon’s youngest cousin stood just outside the room where I’d hidden away to tune my lyre. Half-concealed by a marble pillar, he stared bewildered at my ruined manacles. I’d grown fond of Myron Aetos during my time as a slave. He was a powerfully gifted boy, yet still so young. Trusting. His sky blue eyes looked first to me, then his cousin.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why’d you leave the feast?”

“Sol and I are taking a walk,” Griffon said easily. Utterly shameless, as always. “Care to join us, cousin?”

Myron visibly relaxed, suspicion giving way to curiosity. “Where are you going?”

“Olympia.”

It was cruel, forcing a boy into this position. He could have lied. It was well within Griffon’s ability to give a plausible excuse, send his cousin away. But that wasn’t in his nature. His virtuous heart wouldn’t tolerate such a thing. I rolled my wrists, considering my broken manacles. My pneuma was trickling in through their cracks, slowly, but not enough to manifest. I would have to tear them fully off.

Salt and ash. I clenched my fists and dropped them.

Myron looked like a deer before a lion. He backed up a single step.

“That’s not funny,” he whispered.

“No,” Griffon agreed. “It’s not.”

Myron took off running, feet slapping against the marble floors of the junior mystiko estate as he fled. Griffon made no move to stop him. Only glanced at me, raising an eyebrow challengingly.

“Well? It’s now or never again.” He strode out of the empty room, content with the audacity of what he’d come here to do. I hesitated, glancing back at the room’s bed and its mound of woven wool blankets.

I lifted them carefully and met Athis’ wide eyed stare.

“Are you going with him?” she whispered. My heart lurched in my chest. Three thousand dead men whispered through the cracks in my manacles.

“I don’t know.”

Yet, even as I said it, I was picking up the lyre that I’d dropped and placing it on the bed. She reached desperately for my hand, her fingers slender and calloused by slave work. I squeezed her hand once and let it drop. Before I had consciously decided to do so, I was jogging down the hall to catch up with the arrogant Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn.

“They’ll never let us go,” I said. My pulse pounded. The estate was all but empty, save for the slaves like myself and Athis that had disdained sleep but couldn’t attend the party.

“Naturally. But tragedy of tragedies, my father and all my uncles and aunts are currently at the bottom of this mountain, inducting our honored guests into the greater mystery of the Rosy Dawn.” He flicked his right hand, shooting rosy streamers of light through the air. “I trust you understand what that means.”

Memories of glittering light and a bisected corpse with no face, not a single defining feature. Time slipping through my fingers like sand as I stared into the rising light held in its palm. The dawn. Every legendary cultivator on this mountain, and the patriarch himself, would emerge only after the rites were concluded. We had until the dawn.

“There are dozens of philosophers in this cult,” I warned him. The elders of the Greek cult were men that could have been officers in a typical Roman legion, or senior legionnaires in those led by the tyrant of the west. They weren’t soldiers, of course. Not even close. But they had strength of heart to spare.

“Ho, are you scared?” Griffon asked jeeringly. My virtuous heart throbbed. “Where’s your courage? Where’s that audacity? We’re on the precipice of adventure and you’re worried about a few old men?”

It was the prerogative of a cultivator to tempt the Fates. And in return, it was the prerogative of the Fates to strike them down for their transgressions.

“Stop.”

An elder cultivator appeared at the end of the hall. He was tall, ornately clothed in layered robes of philosopher threads. His beard was long, bone white, his eyes a dull blue that spoke to blindness yet intently traced every detail of us. His body was strong, if not tan or rugged. And as his eyes fell upon my manacles, his pneuma flooded the marble hall.

“Young Aetos,” he thundered. “What have you done?”

“Nothing at all, honored elder!” Griffon called, never once breaking stride as he approached the philosopher. I felt a tension long-buried reassert itself in my soul. I heard the marching drums. “This lowly sophist was just fetching his junior brother for the wedding festivities.”

“His shackles are broken!” The philosopher stalked towards me, thundering retribution in his steps. “This is beyond audacity! There are limits, Young Aetos, even for you. Be assured that your father will be hearing about this, and as for you-”

He wasn’t given the chance to finish. Griffon lunged forward with pneuma flaring, closing the remaining five steps between them in a single bound.

Cultivation was an odd thing. Throughout the known world, there were nearly as many interpretations of man’s relation to heaven and earth as there were cities and kingdoms. The barbarous Gauls had their own primitive understanding of the virtuous realms that lead up to heaven, as did the Celtics and the Numidians across the sea. The Greek interpretation was in many ways similar to the righteous path of the Republic, but even then there were notable differences.

I couldn’t intuitively grasp the immensity of the gap between a captain of the Civic Realm and an elder several ranks deep into the Sophic Realm. These were not my cultural touchstones, despite the efforts of my old mentor. My tongue may have been fluent in their chosen language, but my soul was not.

Still. No matter the culture, some things were simply absurd.

The elder reacted with speed far beyond the mortal limits of a man his age, and it was not enough. Griffon slipped his grasping hand with a snake’s grace. His clenched fist rose, burning with the mark of his cult’s foundational virtue, and drove up into the elder’s gut.

Audacity wasn’t a strong enough word to describe it. The elder’s gasped in disbelief as much as pain, and his pneuma exploded in a wordless virtue. Wind howled through the halls, his dull blue eyes flashing as he drove an open palm down onto Griffon’s outstretched arm. My sense for pneuma was still restrained, but through the cracks in the shackles I could feel the immensity of the force behind it. It was a blow that would shatter bone.

It missed.

Griffon had already withdrawn from the blow, already driven his knee up to meet the palm strike. An invisible thundercrack of force rocked the hall, rending the marble beneath their feet. The Young Aristocrat was no faster than the elder – if anything he was slower – but he moved as if their fight was choreographed.

He stomped his raised leg down onto the elder’s foot, pivoted to avoid his attempt at a grapple, and latched onto the elder’s outstretched arm. He exhaled sharply, and slammed the philosopher over his shoulder. The old man’s back struck the marble.

Griffon fell with him, driving the weight of his body and soul into his elbow and smashing the elder philosopher’s head through solid stone.

For a moment no one moved. The elder because he was unconscious, maybe dead. Griffon and I because the immensity of what he’d just done required a moment of proper appreciation. We locked eyes.

“Now we run,” he decided.

Drum beats and the pounding noise of a thousand dancing feet hit us in a wave as we came charging out of the junior mystiko estate. The layout of the Rosy Dawn Cult was such that we could have disdained the central pavilion entirely, skirted its edge or simply doubled back around the estate we’d just left and descended the mountain into the city of Alikos. Griffon had other plans, though. He ran headlong into the masses, countless initiates celebrating the wedding that was being consecrated beneath our feet in the heart of the mountain.

Flickering torchlight and stars lit the ruined mountaintop. The initiation rites had been outrageous enough the first time I’d experienced them, but watching hundreds upon hundreds of men and women, young and old, dancing without care across a shattered pavilion that had been struck not an hour ago by the fist of a falling star defied belief. Greeks.

I threaded through the crowds at a less frantic pace, tracking the Young Aristocrat as he speared through. He moved with confidence, and when grace failed him he adapted quickly. A woman in fine cult attire bumped into him as he passed, and he turned the collision into a graceful spin, twirling her into another initiate’s arms and swiping her cup of spirit wine in the process. He downed it in one mouthful, scarlet liquid spilling past the corners of his mouth and trailing down his throat. He didn’t once break stride.

My waxing senses traced the initiates around me, but there were too many cultivators packed too closely together, and I was still too restricted by my shackles to meaningfully distinguish between them. I couldn’t feel the ire of any approaching enemies, but that did not mean they weren’t there.

My eyes were drawn to the center of the pavilion where the falling star had struck. Where there should have been a yawning chasm, there instead was the fountain. Reconstituting itself stone by stone in a bizarre example of passive cultivation. A faint mist hung around it, moisture being drawn out of the air itself and into the basin of the fountain in thin spiraling threads.

The faceless statue had yet to reform. Instead, the fountain was filled with dancing women. As the drum beats rose and the chanting wedding song rose to a new peak, they whirled and spun through its waters, kicking up waves. I counted nine before a shout drew my attention away.

Griffon waved an arm from the edge of the crowd, lips moving silently. I read them easily enough. With purpose, slave.

I burst out of the crowd, sprinting after him.

“Can you hear it!?” He called over his shoulder. “The call to adventure screaming in your ear? It’s deafening!” His mania was infectious. I opened my ears, casting out for such a sound.

All I heard was howling.

We sprinted through the mountaintop trails that connected the various estates to the central pavilion, pounding up the marble steps of the Aetos estate. Past its grand columns, the night horizon was slowly lightening to gray. Pre-dawn was giving way, the dead moon falling unseen from its peak. We were nearly out of time.

“Why through here!?” I shouted as we blew through the halls of the main estate. The courtyard with its gardens and pools flashed by on our right, the past patricians of the Rosy Dawn standing timeless watch in their pools.

“I forgot something!”

Worthless, thoughtless Greek.

We ascended the steps to the second level of the estate and sprinted down the shadowed halls. Past the room that I knew to be Griffon’s own quarters. Past the chambers of his male cousins, and those of his uncles. He planted his feet and slid across the marble as we reached a room with a heavy wooden door at the end of the hall, and as he reached it he reared back and kicked it off its hinges.

The office of the cult’s patrician, Damon Aetos, was militantly furnished. It evoked memories of Gaius’ personal quarters while on campaign, those simple tents with their cots and unadorned trunks. Shelves were carved into the smooth pale stone of the wall, filled end to end with rolls of papyrus and clay tablets. A desk of rich dark wood was central in the room, a dining table balanced on three legs and a reclining dinner couch next to it positioned in the far right corner, with an open terrace showing a view of the central pavilion. Tapestries hung on the walls, depicting battles and landscapes that I had never seen or heard of. Carved into the side of the desk itself was a scene of four men, three locked in furious combat against one.

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Griffon disdained the desk and whatever its contents may have been, ignored the tablets and scrolls in their shelves. Instead he crossed over to the far wall, where a sheathed blade was mounted between two tapestries. He lifted the blade off its hooks and gripped the sheath in one hand, the pommel in the other. Gently, he eased it just slightly out of its sheath.

I saw a sliver of bronze that burned even to my dulled senses, and then he slammed it back fully into the sheath and hooked it to his belt.

The sound of running feet drifted through the broken doorway.

“It seems we are found out,” Griffon said, rolling his shoulders. He stepped up beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “Is it time for the Son of Rome to show what he’s made of?” I clenched and unclenched my fists. I couldn’t bring myself to tear those shackles off. I dreaded what would come next too much.

Griffon snorted coldly. “Perhaps he already has.”

He walked past me.

“Lio!”

The Fates were truly cruel.

Myron hadn’t simply run off. Of course he hadn’t. He’d known his limits well enough to understand he couldn’t stop his older cousin alone, so he’d enlisted help. The young generation of the Aetos family had come to stop their wayward cousin.

Lydia Aetos’ gaze slid from Griffon for a bare moment when I exited the patriarch’s study, sky blue eyes flashing hatefully. They refocused in the next instant.

“Lio,” she repeated, softer. “Tell me Myron heard you wrong. Tell me the things he said were lies.”

She stood in the middle of the hall back the way we’d come, with Myron and her younger sister, Rena. The other two, Heron and Castor, were currently sprinting around the other side of the rectangular second floor to prevent us from running the other way. Castor had his blade, Myron’s hands were fidgeting on his daggers, and the Young Miss herself held a spear longer than she was tall in one hand.

Griffon tilted his head, amused. “Seems you already know that’s not the case.”

“Don’t do this,” Lydia pleaded. “You only have to wait a little longer. We’ll travel the world like Niko did, like our parents did. Together.”

“Lio,” Heron seethed, skidding to a stop just a few feet behind us with Castor at his side. “This isn’t another one of your games. There’s no coming back from something like this!”

“Think of what you’d be throwing away,” Castor urged. His eyes flickered, meaningfully, to his older sister. “And for what? A privilege you’ll be given anyway in a few years? All you have to do is be patient.”