1.120 [KINDLE RELEASE]

The Young Griffon

We sprang forth seven strong into the Storm That Never Ceased, and in seconds it divided us.

The roiling cloud cover was as oppressive to the senses as I remembered, the roar of thunder just as deafening and the lines of lightning wrath every bit as blinding. It was unchanged since the last time I had suffered it, and it staggered me in spite of that. Beside me, Sol ducked his chin and raised an arm against the storm, marching on without pause.

Our Heroic companions came rushing in behind us at speeds neither Sol nor I could ever hope to match. The storm did not hesitate to humble them. Lightning flashed in whipcrack strands and every one of the Heroes burnt their hearts’ blood in anticipation of a punishing blow.

Crackling hands of my violent intent slammed twenty blades of tribulation iron into the mountain path in a wide octagon around us. I had already begun drawing them from my shadow as soon as we took our first step into the chaos. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been nearly fast enough. The lightning changed its course and plunged through the blades, seeping into the mountain stone.

Distantly through the storm, I heard the thunder clap of barking hounds. When I looked back to our companions, just a couple steps behind Sol and I, the only portions of them visible through the storm were the flames behind their eyes.

My pankration hands wrenched free each of the blades I had stolen from the mountain and held them ready in the air.

“With me!” Sol commanded, and sprinted towards the braying hounds.

He did his best to hold us all together, as he always had, but Thracia had stolen from him the use of his virtue. Without it he lacked the means to truly guide his loyal toy soldiers. Instead, he began calling a cadence. He drew them into his rhythm and the riptide of his influence, a touchstone in the storm.

When a dog of the lightning wrath spring from the cloud cover and was intercepted by one of twenty tribulation blades, the reverberation of its impact scattered us worse than if the hound had found its mark.

A sound like a giant striking a gong and a tree splitting down its center rang out. Each of us was flung away from the blade, all in a different direction. I felt it as the storm consumed them all, and I cast out the hands of my intent. I reached out urgently, grasping for the arms-

Elissa flailed and met me with her blade, stabbing through my lightning palm. The tail of Kyno’s crocodile cloak whipped my reaching hand away. Lefteris flinched back, Jason twisted to avoid me, and Anastasia ignored the limb entirely in her attempt to re-orient herself midair.

Was it malice or a Hero’s simple instinct? Did the distinction matter in the end?

Now, as once before, the outcome was the same. Hurtling through the empty rage of the immortal storm crown, I might as well have been back in that worthless Scarlet Stadium.

Why wouldn’t they take my hand-?

A heavy hand struck out through the storm and latched onto my own, gripping it tight and pulling me back down to the earth. We hit the ground together and tumbled. My crackling pankration hands swarmed us, bracing against our momentum and pulling us to our feet.

Sol released my hand of flesh and blood and plucked a hand of my intent from the air.

“I’m keeping this,” he declared. Somehow I had to laugh.

We were only moments in and the storm had already divided us. I couldn’t detect a single one of our companions no matter how hard I strained my senses. In this place, it didn’t matter that they could have been a single bound away. The storm that separated us made it an unbridgeable gap. It was as if Sol and I were the only two left on the mountain. The only ones left on this earth.

So why was it that my heart was beating easier now than it had been before?

Why was it that I felt better about our chances as we resumed our march alone?

I pondered it as we climbed.

“You never carved out a spirit block.”

The immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven Cult was a vicious opponent, even to those that had faced it once before. We took refuge from the storm whenever it was offered to us. At the moment, that was beneath a familiar stone statue.

Sol glanced sidelong at me, confused. There was blood on his face. The hounds hadn’t touched him, but they’d shattered mountain stone every time they struck and the flying shards had cut him.

“My what?”

“The blocks of marble I had you carting around,” I explained. “During the qualifying trials before the Rosy Dawn’s initiation.” He grunted, acknowledging the memory. “That wasn’t all for show, not entirely. Chiseling them was a test of skill. A measure of one’s self-awareness, their understanding of their own burgeoning myth.”

“And?” Sol asked knowingly. His eyes scanned the storm ahead. We had yet to reunite with any of the Heroes we had entered with, and we hadn’t found our wayward eighth either. We may have been close. There was no way to know.

“And,” I continued with a flourish of my pankration hands, brandishing all twenty of my stolen blades at the statue of Sisyphus we were crouching underneath. “The result was its own reward. A statue chiseled by your own pneuma, from a block of spirit marble, is a tether to your own refinement. It grows alongside you, refining itself in a direct reflection of your own progression.”

The Rosy Dawn dedicated entire temples to the keeping of such statues. As a child, I had wandered up and down those shadowed halls and marveled at the spirit marbles of those that came long before me. Immortalized in their final moments, standing strong and tall and proud.

“They serve as monuments to our journeys, no matter where the winds might take us. A piece that can be left behind.” I glanced up meaningfully. “A part of us preserved.”

The Twice-Killed Tyrant was as I had left him before, straining against his boulder’s weight and hunching down beneath the storm. Cowering at Raging Heaven‘s wrath.

“What a shame, Sisyphus,” I lamented. “Of all your triumphs and transgressions, this alone is what remains. You waited ‘til the very end to flinch.”

A lightning hound howled in the distance. Sol rose to his feet, gripping the same crackling hand of my intent like a tethering rope.

“We’re going.”

“If you were to chisel one out here and now, what sort of bearing would it take?” I asked him curiously, rising up as well. “What expression would you find on your face?”

“The same one as always,” the Roman said dryly. That storm flashed in his eyes, a mirror image of our surroundings. Somehow, I doubted that.

One of my twenty pankration hands spun its tribulation sword around and drove it into the Twice-Killed Tyrant’s back, returning it to its proper place. I spared Sisyphus one last glance before joining Sol on the path up to the peak.

Scythas commanded the breeze that carried every spoken word in the Raging Heaven Cult, but that unique ability ended where the storm crown began. No matter how many times Sol and I called out his name, we never received a response.

Though we didn’t find any of what we sought, we were found often enough.

Standing back-to-back in a narrow cage made of stolen iron swords, Sol and I gasped for breath while another manifestation of tribulation lightning yelped and howled and was torn apart – dispersed amongst the blades. Returned to the earth. It wasn’t the first dog that had found us, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. The longer we spent in this story, the less likely it became that we’d escape it.

Between panting breaths, I knocked my head back against Sol’s.

“I have an idea, slave.”

Sol snorted. “I’m not your slave.”

“You were my slave,” I pointed out. “And I’m feeling nostalgic. Humor me.”

“No.”

“Thank you. My idea is thus: we right the wrongs the Rosy Dawn did unto you and give you a proper marker of your refinement. We carve it here and now. Something that will endure no matter where your journey takes you – a statue worth admiring, even if its subject is a Roman.”

He sighed. “This again.”

The Roman had his bronze spear in hand, the one we’d taken from the temple of the Father. When another point of light appeared amidst the storm clouds, a static growl betraying its true nature, he didn’t wait for it to test the limits of my cage again. He reared back and heaved his spear through the gap between two swords and struck the hound between the eyes as it leapt forward.

The tribulation hound exploded, like it had been struck by a ballista more than any mortal man’s projectile. A hand of my intent darted out past the cage and caught the spear before it could fly off into the distance and be lost forever, returning it to Sol. He had lost his virtue’s invisible touch during our time in Thracia, but he’d gained something else in exchange. He moved with a weight far beyond the limits of his frame now.

“We have no time,” he said, accepting his spear when I offered it back and stepping past the safety of the cage. We continued on, retracing steps that I had walked months before.

“We are cultivators. We have nothing but time.”

“I have no interest,” Sol corrected himself.

“I’ll join you,” I offered.

Through flashing lights and rolling thunder, the Roman glanced sidelong at me in vague disgust.

“I don’t want your hands chiseling any part of me from marble.”

“Worthless Roman, I’ll carve my own. We’ll stand together through the storm.”

“One immortal vanity isn’t enough for you?”

I smiled faintly, gathering my blades around us as another howl rose up from the east.

“I never said I had one either.”

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“It occurs to me,” I said, a few minutes or perhaps a lifetime later, “that we might have been better off waiting outside the storm for Scythas to emerge.”

“Likely.”

We crept like hunting cats along an overhang that looked down over a pack of hunting hounds. Their lightning hides stood out brightly in the storm. Sol gripped his bronze spear in one hand and one of my stolen tribulation swords in the other. Lacking a third to keep hold of his tether to me, he instead held my lightning limb between his teeth. It gave the impression of a constant snarl.

Aside from freeing up his second hand for a blade, it also gave him an excuse to only speak to me in single word increments – if at all. Between the former and the latter, I suspected I knew which had been the more enticing factor.

“It’s not too late to double back,” I said. It would be treacherous no matter what, but we could make it back down.

Seeking out something within the storm crown was an all but fruitless effort, but that did not mean it was impossible to navigate it. No matter how the Storm That Never Ceased sought to addle your senses, it could not move the axis of the world. The crown atop the mountain was only that – a crown. It could not change the nature of the mountain.

Regardless of the path we took, descending down the mountain would lead us back to the Raging Heaven Cult. Scythas knew that fact as well as we did.

Sol shook his head and continued on. I chuckled and raised my hands in acquiescence.

Of course, the opposite was also true. No matter how long it took us or which mangled paths we were forced to take, our destination was equally assured.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. We were finally of one mind.

So long as we kept climbing, we were bound to reach the peak.

We fought tooth and nail for every step, and the storm crown pressed back harder the higher up we went. By the time we reached the point where I had been forced to turn back alone, we were both a mess of blood and lightning burns. It had been a small eternity since we’d seen another tribulation statue. An untraceable amount of time since we’d had a moment’s rest.

“Tell me something, slave,” I said, and only just dove out of the way in time to avoid the lashing of my own blade. Sol didn’t say a word, but he bit down harder on the lightning limb between his teeth and the pain of it was clear enough. I grinned viciously back at him and posed another question.