1.109

The Young Griffon

It was said that there were as many paths to heaven as there were stars in the night sky. That platitude was one that countless cast-off sons and daughters of Helen clung to every day, assuring themselves of its absolution as soon as they awoke and seeking its cold comfort in the fleeting moments before Hypnos delivered them to rest. The sentiment was appealing, there was no arguing that.

Cultivation favored the bold, and it was the nature of bold men to chafe at the bonds of those that came before. It was only justice that a cultivator should walk his own path to the peak of the divine mountain. It was only virtue that he take for himself what none who came before could provide him.

Yet, the reality of things was that there was a difference between defiance for the pursuit of greater things, and defiance for the sake of defiance. The truth of the matter was that the young generation had a choice – take for themselves what their ancestors had spent their lives scraping through the dirt to achieve, and build upon that foundation a grander monument than any who’d come before could ever hope to match. Or, in spite, discard it, and spend their life scraping through the dirt just as their forefathers had.

It was a fine line to walk, and so alacrity of the spirit was required for any successful soul. Too complacent and you risked becoming a filial son, beholden to your betters and doomed to never outpace them. Too spiteful and you tempted the Fates, ignoring even the best aspects of your ancestry simply because you resent the association.

We loved the solitary rising star, but that didn’t change the fact that we cultivated within a framework based off of the best of our older generations. We refined our reason, our spirit, and our hunger, as distinct and meaningful portions of our bodies and souls, because a wise man of our older generation had spent his life scraping through the dirt for that insight. We sought virtue and lived in accordance to higher ideals, we slayed monsters and liberated our fellow men, and we did much and more because we wanted to measure ourselves against the greatest of the champions that had lit the walls of our nursery caves with the light of their passionate souls.

I’d walked the line between defiance and spite since I was a boy. No one sprang from the womb a master of all things, not even me, and so I took what deserved to be taken from the older generation when they offered it to me. From the charting of stars to the production of art and song, all the way to glorious pankration, I had learned early and often that irreverence was a competent man’s luxury.

Only a fool wasted an opportunity to refine himself. And regardless of what the wise men of the world might think, I was no fool.

“It’s still too crude,” my senior brother in Raging Heaven reproached me, dispelling the rushing wave of my rhetoric without much effort. Chilon clicked his tongue, circling around me in the sun-bathed sands of the stadium pit. “You’re prioritizing speed over substance. You can’t win an argument by speaking over your opponent – not in any way that matters.”

Following our first encounter in the Olympic Stadium over a week ago, Chilon had offered up his experience with rhetoric in exchange for my humble guidance in the art of violence. How could I say no?

“Ho?” I raised an eyebrow, stretching my arms languidly while he circled around me. I was pleasantly tired, but my senses were as sharp as they’d ever been. “An argument of this nature is decided by the last man standing, is it not?”

I leveraged a plain truth, took from its simple strength and cast it out – battering the senior Philosopher with it like a storm’s wave battered a stranded ship.

[Better an ugly flower in full bloom than a withered rose bud.]

The storyteller’s lips twisted in distaste and I felt through my sophic sense the stirring of his own rhetoric as he readied a response. I pivoted on my heel and lunged, scattering his focus and tackling him bodily to the pit sand. His breath exploded out of him, and despite being my senior in age as well as refinement, his immediate attempt to slip my grapple was just shy of pitiful.

“If you can’t manifest your claim, what does it matter if it’s closer to the truth?” I demanded, rearing back and punching him squarely in his jaw. He grunted and thrashed like a beached fish, for all the good it did him. “If I can make my statement and prevent you from ever making yours, how can I be anything but the victor?”

Chilon opened his mouth to respond, and I slapped him across the face with a dozen pankration hands each from a different angle in a cascading sequence.

“If I silence your rhetoric before it can challenge mine, I win by default. Is that not so?”

“No-” he managed to get out, before I slapped him silent again.

“No? Here I am, speaking every word I care to say while your rhetoric lives and dies trapped inside your throat. What does that make me if not the victor?”

[A Tyrant] he intoned in the voice of his soul, and the force of it struck me across the face like a wild haymaker. I spun backward, rolling to my feet and working my jaw while Chilon did the same across from me. My senior initiate scowled at me in exasperation, prodding a loosened tooth with his tongue.

“Suppression is a crutch,” he explained to me, advancing forward. I strafed to the right, maintaining distance between us while I listened. “You’re faster than me, and you’re stronger – in a fight, you can keep my mouth shut if you really want to. But at that point, it can’t be said that we’re exchanging discourse. A conversation is a mutual endeavor, and suppressing the other party is as far from that spirit as one can get.”

“And that’s an issue,” I surmised, “because eventually I won’t be able to suppress my opponent.”

“With how you act?” Chilon snorted. “I’d be surprised if you could go a year of your life without drawing a stronger cultivator’s ire. Especially in this city.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“It is possible to be stronger than someone and also be right,” he explained. “Just because you can overpower an opposing sophist’s argument doesn’t mean you should. Debate a weaker man in good faith and win, and the result will be the same as if you’d beaten him down and choked him with his own unspoken rhetoric.”

“Is that not a point in favor of my approach?” I asked him curiously. “The result is the same, but the time wasted in debate is less.”

I ducked as he abruptly pivoted and swung a sloppy kick at my head. His speed was respectable for a man that spent far more time studying than training his body, but his form was still atrocious and full of tells. I lashed out and slapped the side of the knee that was carrying his weight, buckling it and nearly sending him back down to the sand.

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Grimacing, he regained his balance and carried on.

“Your approach saves time at the expense of your own growth,” he said, kicking sand at my face to mask a roll towards my blindspot. I rolled my eyes and kicked sand right back in his face and he rolled past. His next words were forced out between sputtering coughs: “Debate a hundred weaker men and win a hundred honest times, and you’ll have the weight of each of those experiences behind you when you finally come across someone you can’t suppress with strength alone. Beat down a hundred men before they can speak their minds because you’d prefer not to waste the time, and you’ll be as worthless as a Citizen when it comes time to debate a man that’s stronger than you.”

“And what if there isn’t a stronger man?” I pressed with intent while he squinted in search of an opening. “What if I alone am the strongest man I’ll ever meet?”

“Arrogance,” was all he said before closing the gap again.

Where he delivered verbal instruction, I instructed my senior with physicality alone. He gave the exchange everything he had, though he was utterly out of breath and far from my equal in martial pursuits. I corrected the most egregious of his missteps with carefully placed pankration hands – slapping, poking, and prodding at the sensitive junctures of joints and tendons that were bearing too much or too little of his weight.

He swung at me with a right hook that was far more shoulder than it was hip, and I slapped it aside before demonstrating the proper form. I saw him realize his mistake a moment before I slammed the right hook into his kidney and folded him over my fist.

“There is always a bigger fish,” he wheezed. I hummed, conceding the point.