1.121

The Young Griffon

A Titan is to an Olympian as an Olympian is to a Man.

The Titan Prometheus was larger than anything I’d ever seen with my own two eyes. Large enough that it almost seemed like I could reach out and touch him, despite the dizzying distance that separated Sol and I from the peak of peaks on Kaukoso Mons. Greater than any Tyrant could hope to be, a hundred hands to the Heroic Orpheus’ twenty-five. He could have wrestled the monstrous dragon spirits of the Brothers Aetos’ epic as easily as I had the Heroic Huntsman’s crocodile familiar, and wrung them out each like bloody rags.

He looked like a man writ entirely too large, but there was an uncanny beauty to his proportions that I understood only belatedly. His frame and its features, they were all perfect.

Though the Titan hung from the peak of Kaukoso Mons, left arm and both legs suspended by chains of cruel adamant, he did not appear frail. Though his hair was tangled and slick with sweat, like curling rings of smoke plastered to his forehead, it did not appear unkempt. The tightness around his eyes and the clenching of his jaw, the impotent pain, it did not make him seem pitiful. It was as if in every shifting moment he had been chiseled out of the mountain by a sculptor’s loving hand – an artist’s idealized depiction of a suffering man rather than the living reality.

Larger than life was not a meaningful descriptor. A mortal mind was incapable of constructing a framework capable of containing the Titan Flame. He defied description. He existed in spite of all common sense.

He was looking at us.

Prometheus opened his mouth to speak and the world held its breath to hear him. His teeth and his tongue were stained by glittering liquid gold.

“Captain of salt and ash,” spoke the Thief of Flame, with dark and weary humor. His voice shook the blood in my veins and bid every muscle in my body to clench. It made the flashing lights of the storm crown burn somehow brighter all around us. “Where have your legions gone this time? You’re ever a sorry sight without them.”

Sol stared up at the Titan, stricken beyond words. Prometheus chuckled weakly, and the mountain stone rumbled beneath our feet.

“What a terrible expression. Am I truly so ghastly? No, don’t answer that – my grief is overwhelming as it is.”

Those burning eyes shifted and the full weight of the Titan’s attention struck me like a comet. There was no pneuma, no influence, no flicker of the heart that any of my refined senses could detect. Prometheus looked upon me plainly and it was like I’d stepped into the sun.

“And you must be-”

Surprise flickered in the light of twin stars.

“Young blood?”

“High-minded son and brazen thief of flame – against my will and yours, I must bind you with chains of adamant which no one can remove to this cliff face.”

Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall

Scythas ran with no hope of true escape.

The alchemical furnace was an overwhelming weight in his arms, its contents far heavier for their significance than the stone furnace itself. He was forced to run like a drunkard through the Storm That Never Ceased, lurching and stumbling without grace as the lightning pursued him. If he moved the way his body knew how to move, he’d surely spill the brew.

Take it.

He’d die before he spilled a drop.

As the seconds passed and drew their scars across his heart, the fire behind his eyes burned brighter and brighter. Scythas knew that death was not far behind him.

The initiation rites of the Raging Heaven Cult were unlike any other in the Free Mediterranean. They were dangerous to every cultivator that dared undergo them. Standing made no difference. Family ties, political power, refinement of the soul – in any other mystery cult, these things mattered. Anywhere outside of Olympia, high standing was its own assurance of success.

The storm crown did not care.

When hopeful initiates of the Raging Heaven Cult stepped into the storm, they were only obligated to take a single step away from their peers. One step, one transgression against the heavens, was proof enough according to the kyrios. They were joined each year by their would-be seniors, advanced Philosophers and Heroic souls that had burnt their hearts’ blood in search of glory.

The intent was for their seniors to pierce through the storm crown ahead of the new prospects and clear a path for them to climb. If not to make it easy, then at least to make it possible.

Yet each year, those senior Sophists and Heroic souls were some of the first to come racing back down the mountain. Wild-eyed and with their hearts in their throats. Senselessly terrified, every one.

Scythas knew this, because he had been the first of the Heroes to turn back when his turn had come. One step alone into the storm crown and no further. He’d taken that first step, realized he could no longer hear the whispers on the wind, and he turned away in naked terror. Jason had come lunging out just a split second after him.

Their peers had named them cowards for it later, accused them of abandoning their juniors, and Scythas hadn’t been able to deny it. But though they hadn’t been wrong, they also hadn’t been much better. Every one of their Heroic peers had fled the storm crown before the last of the initiates, when they were meant to be the shepherds from the beginning to the very end.

They had all failed. Scythas had simply failed first and most profoundly.

“Pathetic,” the Hurricane Hierophant had branded him, the most disappointed that Scythas had ever seen the man. The Tyrant’s daughter had looked upon him with tears in her eyes, so disappointed was she in her future husband.

“Pathetic,” the kyrios had agreed the next time they spoke. “Though the king has little room to talk. One step alone is more than he’d ever dare transgress.”

The scholars of the Raging Heaven Cult did everything they could to distinguish themselves so that they might earn a place to sleep that was further from the storm. The Heroic souls that hoped to one day challenge the Fates themselves could only measure their time within the storm crown in seconds before they each turned back in shame. The Tyrant Elders of Olympia wouldn’t even look upon the storm. The reason for all three behaviors was the same.

A clap of thunder and howling wolves threw Scythas from his feet. Tumbling, he clutched the stone furnace desperately and raised it up. He twisted and allowed his body to be battered while he caught the sloshing red liquid out of the air and returned it to its basin. He whistled frantically, burning his heart’s blood, and cutting winds blasted out from him in every direction.

A hound of seething lightning caught a wind scythe in its teeth and bit down. A strand of tribulation’s light arched through the air between them, tracing Scythas’ pneuma back to him and striking him over his heart. His back arched in helpless agony.

Urania! he called out, but his plea went unanswered.

The storm crown didn’t care where you stood. It only cared to tear you down. It only sought to unmake you,

And it would not cease until its work was done.

Tucking the furnace under one arm, Scythas drew his sword with the other and buried it in the hound’s skull when it lunged for him.

The dog did not die, but it was flung away in an explosion of concussive force. Scythas fared no better He let the blade go careening into the storm clouds and wrapped his numb arms around the furnace, curling his body around it and whistling a prayer to the wind.

The further he cast out his pneuma, the more eyes within the storm he drew. Even this much was tempting the Fates, but he had made a promise to himself and a promise to Solus. He would take the risk.

The wind caught every drop of nectar that the explosion had flung into the air and returned them to the furnace. The storm dashed it from his control a split second later.

Scythas slammed into an upright column of stone and bit halfway through his tongue. He slumped down, bleeding from his mouth and only seeing half the world through glassy eyes. He wasted precious moments like that, fighting for control of his senses as the storm saught to finish what the Gadfly had begun.

When a woman’s familiar face leaned down into his blurred vision, Scythas was certain that he was only seeing stars. Yet as his eyesight slowly cleared, she grew more prominent in his view instead of less. Not a fleeting trick of the storm’s light, nor the nearly transparent constellation that he had known her as since his ascension. The woman leaning over him, peering out from a cage made up of suffering men and women, was carved entirely from stone.

“I am with you, hero,” the statue of Urania assured him, stone lips curling impossibly into a fond smile as she regarded him. “Now as ever. Here until the end.”

“Far from all mortal men, where you will never hear a human voice or glimpse a human shape.”

The Young Griffon

A dead man looked down on me with sly eyes, leaning over the edge of the balcony, his place of prominence inside the Orphic House.

“Tell me-”

“Young blood,” the Titan Prometheus said again, a low murmur that threatened to deafen me. He raised his right hand to cover his face, abruptly disoriented. “No, that’s not…”

I traced the dangling chain that hung from the manacle around his right wrist. The manacles were made of the same material as the chains, a dazzling synthesis of ruby and sapphire and amethyst joined. Unbreakable adamant.

“Look,” I hissed. The lightning limb that Sol had claimed reached up and grabbed the back of his neck, forcing him to look down.

That the Titan could move his right hand at all should have been impossible. The chain meant to hold his right arm tight against the cliff face hung free instead, swaying with the motion of his arm and terminating at a single broken chain. Who could have done such a thing? No one. It was an impossible question, because it had no answer – adamant was immutable once forged.

The impossible answer stood beneath Prometheus’ feet, immortalized in tribulation stone.

Barring the Titan Porphyrion, it was the tallest statue on the mountain. It was a man, if such a thing could be believed, both broad-shouldered and heavily muscled even for his size. The clothing carved for him from stone was a humble contrast to the fineries of the Tyrants that languished in the storm. Heaven’s hand had chiseled for him only a tunic of plain cloth and the monstrous pelt of a lion.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author’s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The statue had been carved out of a single moment, the man’s shoulder length hair blowing wildly behind him. His head was tilted back, a savage grin carved into his lips. Twin jewels of cut and polished amethyst glimmered in place of eyes, narrowed in firm defiance.

The statue of the Champion held the other broken end of Prometheus’ chain in his right hand, and with his left he pointed a golden blade at the skies above. Of all the shameful, suffering souls that I had found within the storm, the immortal memory of Herakles alone stood defiant.

“Is it ivory or is it horn?” Prometheus whispered, and we couldn’t help but overhear him. “How long could it have possibly been? I feel as if I’ve only just closed my eyes, and yet…”

“And yet?” I called when the Titan trailed off, tearing my gaze away from the Champion’s statue. My heart stuttered in my chest and ice shot through my veins when I saw that the fingers of Prometheus’ right hand had parted, and he was staring down at us through the gap.

“And yet here you are already.”

“You know us?” Of all the myriad impossibilities, that one should have shocked me least. The Titan had clearly recognized Sol, or at least seemed to think he did before laying eyes on me. He’d seen my brother and expected me to be someone else.

“Of course I do. I must. It was my hand that molded you from clay, my hand that stole for you a spark.” The Titan was trying to convince himself as much as he was us. He sounded bewildered and fatigued. His free hand dragged down his face, smooth nails digging into his own flawless skin. “I may not be your Father, but you are my children all the same. I know you all. I carry you all with me, here.” His hand settled over his heart, and my own thrummed inside my chest like a struck gong.

Sol caught me by the shoulder and it was only then that I realized I had fallen. I staggered, fine hairs prickling on my skin and cold sweat dousing me like rain water. I cursed my sudden infirmity and forced pneuma through my legs to brace them.

Vital strength flooded my limbs and I nearly slammed my head into Sol’s chin as I exploded back to my feet. Sparks danced in my vision as I was all but overwhelmed by the sudden surge of vitality. My lungs felt overfull – no, not overfull. Overfull implied pain, implied a lack of space to hold my breath. This feeling wasn’t that. This was something pure. It felt as though my body was not my own, and yet more my own than it had ever been.

My breath flowed freely, utterly unobstructed. Like I’d been born anew.

“What was that?” Sol finally found his voice, and used it to demand answers of the Flame. “What did you do to us?” Us?