1.123 [Libertas]

Hero of the Scything Squall, Scythas

He raised the pewter cup to his lips-

And paused before it could touch them. He stared down at his golden reflection in the nectar.

“Hero?” Urania’s remnant statue whispered, puzzled.

The roads ahead of you are long. Drink of my drink, young Scythas, and be strong.

Spiraling beyond the Muse’s stone cage, five starlight paths still shimmered in his mind’s eye. Some parallel, others below – none higher than his own place on the mountain.

“May I borrow this cup?”

Urania’s stone lips curled.

—

Though you are a god, you were not deterred by any fear of angering the gods.

—

The Young Griffon

Where did I stand?

It felt like an eternity that I had been waiting. Waiting for someone to ask me that question and for them to truly mean it.

The Titan Flame posed the question with knowing dread. He suspected my answer, perhaps could see it in my soul before he’d even asked, and he understood the scope of it. It worried him. I could see in the tightening of his eyes and the clenching of his jaw that it agonized him to see his children take such an outrageous stance. I could feel his concern in the pounding of my own heart.

That didn’t change my answer. My virtuous heart may not have been adamant-wrought, but its convictions were immutable all the same.

Sol and I tilted our heads to regard each other at the same time, seeking each other’s answers and realizing at that moment that we both already knew. I smiled brightly while he snorted and failed to hide his smirk. In synchronicity we reached up, up to the towering statue of the amethyst-eyed Champion that we had both cut our teeth on stories of as boys. Up, to the golden blade Herakles had brandished challengingly at the skies in his final moments.

It was nearly too tall to reach without jumping, but reach we did. Straining, I laid my hand against one edge of the blade just above its hilt. Sol laid his hand against the other side, and as one we drew our palms sharply down. A swift line of burning sensation, and the skin of our palms parted without any jagged edges. Two clean cuts.

Prometheus had cleansed us of our myriad filths and brushed away our scrapes and bruises like he was smoothing over wet clay. Now we had only a single wound to mark our passage through the storm, even more stark for its singularity.

I held my bleeding palm up to the Titan Flame, and my brother did the same beside me.

“I stand against any existence that would rather press down than lift up,” I spoke clearly, staring up into the menacing light of twin suns. “Whatever their reasons may be, they are not good enough.”

The Titan Prometheus was a uniquely reviled existence. Traitor to his brothers the Titans for siding with the Father in his cosmic Titanomachy, and later a traitor to their usurping sons the Olympians in his theft of heavenly flame. Despised by Titans. Despised by gods. Forever cursed to suffer for his care, and forbidden even the coldest comfort of fond remembrance by those he’d given up everything for. They’d taken everything from him. From us.

We’d forgotten his name.

It was the uncertainty that killed a man. My father had taught me that lesson long ago. A man could suffer forty cracks of the whip without breaking down if he knew that forty was all he had to bear. By that same measure, a cultivator could watch lightning fall from a clear blue sky and ignore the terror of his animal instinct if he knew that it would fall. If he knew that advancement lay on the other side of tribulation, he could do more than weather it – he could seek it out. He could relish it.

To pursue the heights was to tempt the Fates, every man knew that. But he did it anyway, because he knew there was something far greater than any pain at the peak of the mountain. That was why we defied the Fates. That was why the Muses sang stories in our names.

That was how it was meant to be.

But now the peak was out of sight, shrouded by storm clouds and its highest paths buried in ice and snow. I had spent the entirety of my life wondering why no one acted in accordance with their own words, why the platitudes of cultivating virtue so rarely moved in step with the actions of supposed cultivators. I had only begun to understand the scope of it upon leaving my father’s city. I had only begun to suspect the existence of a universal ailment, a sickness of the earth inflicted by the heavens, upon my induction into the Orphic mysteries.

It was only here and now that I finally saw the root of that disease. This world was lesser than it should have been, little more than a flickering shadow on the wall, and people clung to that shadow because they knew nothing else beyond it. Not because they had no interest, no. Not because they lacked hunger. They had no choice.

“They took your name from us,” I told Prometheus, and though my heart felt like it would burn me to ashes in its wrath, I couldn’t help but laugh. “They hate you! Because you elevated us in the smallest of degrees! Because that was enough to make them wonder!”

The heavens had stripped us of our greatest shining stars and dared us to climb the mountain in darkness. It was the uncertainty that killed a man.

All any man ever needed to succeed was an example. All he had to know was that it could be done.

Prometheus was one of those examples. Here he was, here was proof that heaven was not infallible. The Titan hung as a living example of heaven’s impotent rage – and it was impotent, for all its grandeur. The chains of adamant, the stone-carved monuments to man’s hubris, and the immortal storm crown in its entirety. None of them changed that Prometheus had won. If only for an instant and in the smallest of degrees.

Heaven could lash Prometheus until the end of time, but it could not take back the flame he’d stolen in our name.

I remembered that now. I’d never forget it again.

“And you?” the Titan asked heavily of my brother.

Sol’s answer was succinct.

“No dogs under heaven.”

Then in hunger, this dog of heaven shall devour you.

The answer only made sense to me because he’d told me how his world had ended, back when we fled from the Rosy Dawn. It would have been nonsense to anyone else, but he seemed to think Prometheus would understand. And why not? He could reach out without placing a finger on our brows and rebalance us, refine us as cultivators as simply as brushing out the imperfections in a clay sculpture. Why wouldn’t he be able to reach into our memories as well?

My nose wrinkled, lips twisting at some half-imagined taste. What was the point of all the work if it could be undone or done better by a higher power? Where was the security of a sound mind if mortal memory could not be trusted? If all it took was sufficient standing to reach in and change what should have been immutable to all but its owner’s intent-

“You’ve only just begun to understand the forces arrayed against you,” the Titan Flame told me like he was answering my question, and with sudden cold fury I realized he was. Prometheus smiled that same bleak smile he’d worn when he first laid eyes on us. “And only the barest sliver of their powers over you. Even their gifts are a pox upon your souls – Heaven is cruel even to those that it wishes well. If you stand against it with purpose, you will suffer. You will be hurt in ways your fellow man could never think to hurt you. Ways you can not possibly understand.”

I was tired of being overestimated and looked down upon at the same time. Gathering up the eddies of my influence and boiling them with the mad flames of the Orphic House’s initiation rites, I struck out with the truth of my lived experience. My comprehension of Heaven’s cruelty.

I had seen Zagreus suffer in the Mother’s hands. For a brief moment, I had been him.

“I understand more than you think,” I told the Titan Flame. Sol grunted his rough agreement beside me.

For the first time, though, the target of my Orphic experience was not shaken. Prometheus only pounded his unshackled fist against the cliff behind him.

“You understand nothing. You don’t even know his name.”

“Zagreus,” Sol said. The Titan shook his head helplessly.

“Then who?” I challenged.

The Titan corrected us both.

[ ]

What?

[ ]

Worthless titan, why move your lips if you aren’t going to speak-

[KING OF NOTHING]

My vision went white. Over the roaring in my ears, I heard Sol exhale like he’d been punched in the gut.

[KING OF NO ONE]

How much had we forgotten?

[TWICE-BORN HEIR TO RAGING HEAVEN]

How much had been lost before we were even born?

[TWICE-CURSED BASTARD OF FALLEN STARS]

How much more did they plan to take from us?

[TWICE-NAMED AND TWICE-FORGOTTEN]

“Dio-” the Titan Flame spoke two syllables of a name, each one ringing my tripartite soul like a bell, and then his breath hitched in his throat. The twin stars of his eyes blazed in sudden alarm, and he looked up at the storm crown. “Already?”

In the furthest distance, a pinprick of light appeared. It was a different shade than the lightning, and where the lines of tribulation vanished as quickly as they came, this light lingered.

Prometheus’ alarm gave way to terror.

“Go,” he said, and when neither Sol nor I moved he roared, “LEAVE!”

“Why?” I couldn’t hear my own voice over the ringing in my ears.

“Too soon, it’s too soon!” The Titan shook his head and clenched his eyes shut, quenching their lights and leaving only the illumination of lightning and the steadily growing glow above. I traced the trajectory of the Champion’s golden sword and realized it was leveled directly at the blooming light.

“Too soon for what?” Sol shouted, but Prometheus wasn’t listening. He groaned in despair and lurched against his adamant bonds, wrenching fruitlessly at his manacles with the hand that Herakles had freed.

“The die is not yet cast. The clay is still wet, the world is still unwell – the wheel is still turning.” The Titan fell into broken ramblings, and the light above grew steadily brighter.

The sound of Sol rushing out from under the Champion’s statue was what finally tore my eyes from the light. I whipped my head around and watched him sprint away from the Titan, fleeing back down the mountain.

He got halfway there before I struck him like a javelin, tackling him to the stone and sending us both tumbling.

“Worthless Roman!” I shouted furiously, rolling up into a crouch and bringing each of my pankration limbs to bear. “Where do you think you’re going!?”

Sol rolled to a stop in a trench carved by his own overbearing weight and propped himself up with one arm, glaring balefully at me. Without a word, he reached into his shadow with his other hand and pulled a golden cup of wine from it. I stared at it. It was full to the brim.

“You had two-?”

Sol drank deeply from it, ignoring my outraged cry, and then dunked the half-emptied cup into the liquid lead pool of prima materia he’d been heading towards when I tackled him.

Ah.

Above our heads, the light had grown blindingly bright and spread further through the storm, suffusing the clouds with shades of crimson and gold. Prometheus’ eyes snapped open, staring up into it, and he bellowed in sudden defiance. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life, louder than any noise mortal ears were meant to hear.

And then it became the second loudest sound I’d ever heard, as a cry came down from on high and utterly overwhelmed it.

—

You gave men honors they did not deserve, possessions they were not entitled to.

—

Stone Sirens of the Storm

Among the dozens of statues that languished unseen within the immortal storm crown on Kaukoso Mons, eight alone stood out above the rest. It had been nine, before, but all that remained of Calliope now was rubble. Still, eight. Eight muses carved from hallowed stone, each of them protected from the storm by rings of stone-carved supplicants.

Time was a semantic concern at the peak of the mountain. No sun to rise and fall, no moon to wax and wane. Days passed as readily as years and as easily as centuries. Throughout it all, the statues of the Muses remained untouched. They were untainted by the passing of ages and unmarred by the grim light of tribulation.

The dull passage of eternity was its own unkindness, of course. It was rare for them to receive any company at all this far up the mountain. For all of them to receive a visit within the same day was a nigh unprecedented treat, and one they’d remember for ages to come.

That it had happened once made this a good decade already. That it had happened again not even a month later, that had made this a grand decade. Brief as it was, the conversation livened the holy women of the storm crown. It returned them to the earth from their high heavenly musing. Grounded them.

When a third guest rounded the mountain to pay their respects within that very same year, the stone sirens experienced a brief glimpse of emotion that they had not experienced in many many mortal lifetimes.

Excitement.

For four of the eight sirens, there were yet more curiosities in store. Bedraggled and near death, four little glories nonetheless found their way to the Muses that had marked their hearts just minutes after the third guest had departed them. Each of the four sirens were in such high spirits after their third visit that they didn’t even mind the pitiful sight of the fourth. That they had made it this far up the mountain was enticing enough.

“Welcome to my humble home,” Terpsichore the Dancer sang to the flickering little glory as they dragged themselves into the safety of her cage. A slender-faced young woman, though of course all of her kind were young to the siren, the little glory was ravaged by scars both inside and out.

The flame behind her eyes was dim, hardly more than warm coals as she collapsed to the ground at Terpischore’s feet. The little glory mumbled deliriously, static tremors causing the individual hairs on her haid to rise up apart from the rest. The fingertips of the hand that held her bronze sword were burnt black.

Terpsichore leaned in and watched the little glory as it watched her, dull eyes the color of desert heat flickering in hazy half-recognition. The young woman whispered a name in wonder, and Terpsichore giggled.

“I wonder, should I be offended or amused? Even if my face is carved from stone, confusing me for a man is simply too cruel – surely this ‘Song Yu’ isn’t nearly as beautiful as me.”

As she said it, a dim remembrance of the men known in the East as the Song of the South flickered in the flame behind the little glory’s eyes, close enough to the surface for the siren to see it. The Dancing Muse blinked stone eyes, pleasantly surprised.

“That is a lovely face,” she murmured appreciatively. The siren cupped her stone chin, then after a moment nodded decisively. “Very well, I’ll forgive your confusion.”

The little glory visibly forced her mind to clear, biting the inside of her cheek and blinking her eyes rapidly to clear them. Her gaze became searching, flitting up and down the siren’s form and lingering on her crown – a pair of wavy ram’s horns that looked almost out of place on her brow, so perfectly suited were they to act as the arms for a lyre.

“Terpsichore?” her little glory whispered.

“Erato?” rasped another, halfway around the mountain, hunching over to fit within the Lovely Muse’s cage while he cradled a mutilated crocodile in his arms.

“Polyhymnia?” wondered yet one more inside the Sacred Poet’s cage, leaning on his longbow like an overburdened cane when his broken legs refused to support his weight.

“Thalia?” gasped the last of them between panting breaths, slumping back against the stone cage and spending pneuma as fast as she inhaled it to mend her many wounds.

“The very same,” each siren answered, and each of them regarded the hearts that their other selves had claimed with naked curiosity. “Tell me, hero,” each of them bade, “what brings you up the mountain?”

Their answers varied in composition and intent, but each of their desires was the same.

Nectar.

Nectar for strength to walk the silk road, nectar for love and the bridging of its gaps, nectar for another’s anonymity, and nectar for a cure. Each of their desires were laid bare before the sirens, and each one alone was compelling in its way. Yet their actions were not matched to their ambitions, and each of the four sirens found themselves disappointed.

The author’s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Perhaps it wasn’t fair of them. They’d received so much exceptional company recently, they’d become spoiled again. It was impressive enough that these little glories had made it to them at all. They’d earned themselves a touch of favor, the sirens decided.

And even if they hadn’t, it would be far too cruel for them to disregard their third guest’s wishes after he’d fought so hard to see them fulfilled.

“You’re in luck, little sword,” Terpsichore said, eyes crinkling cheerfully, and reached into her stone silks.

“Have hope, lover.” Erato pulled a drinking cup of flawless pearl from her stone robes, and held it up to the battered glory and his mangled crocodile.

“Rest easy, young shepherd,” Polyhymnia comforted the archer as his grip slackened on his bow and he sank down to his broken knees. She pressed her cup into his shaking hands.

“Look no further, sly bird.” Thalia the Joy winked, curling stone fingers over the cup of blood red brew she’d pressed into the breathless healer’s hands.

Each of the four sirens chipped away a small piece of themselves and dropped the slivers of stone into their cups. And though each of the sirens envied their sister for her choice of glory, they still smiled as their own little ones watched with bright-eyed wonder as the crimson poison in their cups turned to liquid gold.

“Drink of my drink and be strong,” they urged their guests. When their little glories thanked them desperately, emphatically, the sirens waved their gratitude away. Because they had only done the easiest of the work, and an eternity trapped in stone was no excuse for poor manners. “Don’t thank me. Thank the man that filled my cup for you.”

“What-”

“Someone was here-”

“When did they-”

“Who?”

Wistfully, the stone sirens answered.

“A hero.”

—

Because of that, you will remain on guard, here on this joyless rock, standing upright with your legs straight, and you will never sleep.

—

Jason, Hero of the Alabaster Depths

“A siren’s toying with the heart, I left beneath the sea!”

Through frigid rain and roaring thunder the captain of the sunken Icarus trudged along a mountain path in search of anything at all. He’d wandered for so long and endured so many hurts that he’d accept anything. Ideally the nectar, yes, but a friend would do just as well. A peer, failing that. Really, at this point he’d be thankful for another suffering statue.

“Let it be, let it be, let it be – I’ll find another better one!”

He dodged unnatural tendrils of grasping lightning, though by smaller margins every time. Every step forward dulled his reflexes just a bit more.

Jason came upon a fork in his path and hesitated. One branch continued on up, closer to the peak. The other lead down, retreating from the storm crown and returning to fresh air and sweet safety. Jason wavered between them.

The first and last time he’d set foot inside the Storm That Never Ceased, he’d only made it a single step. One step into the storm, and a second that he’d abandoned halfway.

Jason growled and turned away from the downslope, continuing up the path.