1.105 [Chilon]

Chilon

The Obol Orator

Every institution had its daily routines – the underlying maintenances and mechanisms that an outsider looking in might not necessarily see. Naturally, the more prestigious the institution and the grander its scale, the more opaque it became. There was appeal in a veil of transparent silks, as there was mystique in the shifting silhouettes behind a cloth curtain. What, then, lurked beyond the marble wall? A mystery.

As a boy in a no-name village far from any civilized place, those separations had been thin indeed. Children at play and students about their studies had mingled freely with their parents and mentors, the cleansing of garments and bodies had both been communal, and what hierarchy there had been paled in comparison to the stratification of the proud Greek city-states – to say nothing of the greater mystery cults housed within them.

Growing up, Chilon had known exactly who was harvesting the produce and butchering the meat that appeared on his table. He had known exactly who washed his clothes, how they did it, where and at what time of day. He knew who made those clothes, as he knew who made the pottery that held his wine and water. He’d seen for himself how his home was run. They made no secret of it, after all.

The Raging Heaven Cult was a different existence altogether. It prided itself on its secrecy, as all mystery cults did, and that mentality was reflected at every level. Even down to the minutiae of daily living.

Chilon woke with the dawn. At his level of refinement, a cultivator on the eighth step of the Sophic Realm, sleep was an indulgence more often than it was a necessity. In the course of his forty-odd years as an initiate of the Raging Heaven, he’d spent maybe a tenth of that time at rest. In his experience, the further he advanced through the realm of thinking men, the more his thoughts kept him up at night – and the less his body protested the lack of sleep.

Recently, though, his routine had changed. Rather than wandering Kaukoso Mons or the wilds beyond the city, Chilon stayed in his quarters at night. More often than not he kept a torch at hand and passed the time with a scroll of papyrus or a stack of clay tablets at his side, but occasionally he allowed himself to rest.

He wasn’t alone in this shift, he knew. Since the kyrios’ passing, the mountain trails of the Raging Heaven’s estates had been conspicuously empty past sunset. Her polished stone halls went untraversed.

No one wanted to be caught outside their rooms when the crows came calling.

They had all suffered in the weeks and months since the kyrios’ funeral, and none of them could say a thing about it – not to anyone capable of changing things. The Elders were on the hunt, and anyone caught in the middle of their game was nothing but an unfortunate casualty. The knowledge grated on Chilon, made him weary, and he saw that same weariness reflected in the hearts and minds of his juniors. His own peers, senior Philosophers whose wisdom would make waves in any other corner of the world. Here, they weren’t even worth the consideration of a warning.

But it would be a disservice to those that worked behind the marble wall to say that Chilon and his peers were the ones suffering the most from this hostile environment. It was easy to forget, easy not to consider it at all, but beyond the frightening majesty of the Storm That Never Ceased and the trappings of the indigo cult, there were flesh and blood servants that made the smallest wheels turn. Not cultivators like Chilon and his fellow initiates. Just men and women. Just slaves, at the mercy of grim scavengers.

Chilon rolled out of bed, scattering sheets of papyrus covered corner-to-corner in yesterday’s scribblings. There was a fresh set of silk robes folded neatly at the threshold to his quarters, predominantly white cloth with interweaving bolts of cerulean and crimson threaded through it. The senior members of the cult, the prodigies and predominant families, wore indigo. The lowest juniors wore pure white. Those like him, somewhere in between, wore a blend of white, indigo, red, and blue, depending on their relative standing within the cult.

Chilon donned cult attire that hadn’t been there when he went to sleep, and took a handful of berries and thoughtfully arranged meats from a table that hadn’t been there when he closed his door the night before. Absently popping a cut of lamb into his mouth, he drew his fishing net shut and heaved its contents over his shoulder. Ready to face the day.

Someone had made those things happen. It was something the juniors didn’t think about all that often, especially those that had come from aristocratic families already, but it was the truth all the same. A servant had come to his room in the night and quietly taken his unneeded things and left fresh ones in their place.

It was so obvious that it didn’t warrant observing, really. But in a place like this, it was easy to forget that the silks didn’t spin themselves, and the wine didn’t spring from the mountain’s amethyst veins into their waiting cups.

The Philosophers of the Raging Heaven Cult cowered in their rooms every night, while the servants carried on as always. Spinning the wheels that no one cared to see. Suffering the cruelty of crows because they didn’t have the choice of staying home until dawn.

It was wrong that they suffered, the servants as well as the initiates. But what could a man alone do?

Nothing but his best.

“Easy,” he corrected a boy that was young enough to be his son and nearly his equal in cultivation, a mid-rank philosopher in robes of deep cerulean and lightning threads of crimson.

The boy stiffened and stood up straighter, the opposite of what Chilon had advised. He glanced warily back at him, eyeing his attire and the fishing net full of scrolls and tablets he carried over his shoulder.

“Senior brother?” the boy asked, letting his sword fall to his side. He was polite, but only just. His annoyance at being interrupted was clear enough.

“Your stance is too stiff,” Chilon elaborated, moving up beside him. He’d glimpsed the boy practicing with his blade in the shade of a stone-garden grotto, and immediately picked out the leading flaw in his approach. “Let me guess – you’re trying to imitate the Sword Song?”

The boy’s irritation shifted at once to knee-jerk offense. He spun and jabbed his blade at Chilon’s chest. Chilon jerked back a step, and the boy sneered up at him.

“This lowly sophist thanks his wise senior for his attempt at guidance, but you’re mistaken. My style is mine.”

“You and I both know that isn’t true,” Chilon said patiently, skirting around the threatening edge of the blade and poking the boy’s wrist. “Again, you’re too stiff. You’ve done an admirable job of imitating the final step in a long and elaborate dance, but you don’t know any of the preceding steps or how to connect them. You can’t hear the song.”

“I told you-”

“Relax,” he urged the young mystiko, leaning down to press a hand against the back of his right knee so that it would reflexively bend. When the boy hissed and spun around with his blade, he quickly jerked away from it again. “These stances aren’t meant to be this stiff – the Sword Song was named for her fluidity, the grace of her motion. Every step should contain a portion of the step that came before and the step that follows after. Continuous-”

“Enough!” the boy snapped. His pneuma rose, his influence lashing out in the beginning of a tantrum. “Enough. I don’t need advice from a scribe without a blade, and I didn’t ask for it. Leave me be.”

Chilon looked him up and down with a critical eye. That had been better, in that moment where his temper nearly overcame him. “Have you tried thinking less about the forms?”

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The boy blinked owlishly at him. His pneuma whirled around him. “You’re telling me to stop thinking?”

“It seems to be working against you,” Chilon agreed. The boy’s lips drew back from his teeth, an ugly expression to match his form.

“Old man,” he seethed, tensing, “Let’s exchange discourse.” All at once, his pneuma surged and his blade surged forward with his full weight behind it, a coiling thrust that Chilon had seen before in a far more sophisticated form.

Shifting sideways and letting the blade blow past him, Chilon swung the fishing net full of stories from over his shoulder and slammed it into the boy’s unguarded side.

The breath exploded out of the young sophist and his blade flew from his fingers, tumbling end over end in the grass while the boy flew across the shadowed grove and bounced off the face of Kaukoso Mons with an ugly crack. Chilon winced. A bit too hard, then.

“Do you know why that didn’t work?” he asked the boy, kneeling beside him and placing his sword gingerly outside of his reach.

The young mystiko glared blearily up at him, his eyes unfocused by the blow he’d taken to his head.

“Take your time,” Chilon told him.

The boy vomited on the grass between them.

More than a bit too hard. Something to keep in mind for the future.