1.126

The Son of Rome

The melee grew more chaotic the further down the mountain we went. The junior estates for the youngest and least of the Raging Heaven’s mystikos came and went, and soon enough I saw that it was more than just my own shaky coalition at war on this mountain. I had hoped otherwise, but deep in my gut I’d known. The initiates of the Howling Wind, Broken Tide, Waning Wax, and Scattered Foam had made it furthest up the mountain, but they were not alone.

I sprinted through the fork that joined our winding path to the primary steps, those that led straight down to the Raging Heaven’s grand entry gates, and I saw a grim cacophony of refined violence spilling all the way down the mountain.

Hundreds upon hundreds of cultivators from all over the free world spat and shouted and raged against one another in countless personal vendettas, acting for all the world as if every single one of them was center stage and all the rest of the mountain their audience. I saw flashing blades forged from iron and bronze, some studded with gems and others inlaid with glimmering veins in the style of the mountain’s tribulation amethyst.

I saw cult techniques spring forth in the dozens with every passing moment, manifested virtues like crashing waves and gale winds that raged without regard for bystanders. I saw men and women washed away and buried beneath their fellow initiates. In other places I saw them crushed and burned and blinded – some all at the same time. The brawl unfurled beneath us like a scroll, and every petty feud I saw was a word written in Raging Heaven’s blood – each one burning sullen as a brand.

For every sword that cut its intended target, there was another that strayed into a nearby brawl. An unnoticed initiate run through by mistake, a sure blow knocked aside by another cultivator’s strike, and on and on it went. In some places, even apparent allies in the same cult attire clashed like raging bulls.

It was a sickening sight, and at the same time it made my palms itch in anticipation. The Roman portion of my soul was at odds with the Greek portion, as was usually the case. I could almost feel it, ridiculous as the thought seemed.

Griffon, for his part, was entirely in his element. His pankration hands were a blur of scarlet light around him as he ran down the mountain path, catching and redirecting and casting aside whatever stray techniques and weapons came his way. The further we descended the worse the fighting got, yet his good mood had only grown.

“I still don’t like it.” His words were damning, but his eyes remained bright. “If everything goes exactly as you want it to, you’ll have only bought them time. The tree has nine roots – one of them is dead and the other eight are rotten. It doesn’t need tending. It needs uprooting.”

“Maybe so. But are we strong enough to uproot it?”

Griffon leapt into the air and spun, dodging a volley of shimmering bronze arrows that thrummed with vicious energy. He struck the archer responsible, a junior philosopher from the Brazen Aegis, with a roundhouse kick to the side of the head. The woman was unconscious before she hit the ground.

“Not yet,” he conceded. “I still don’t like it. It’s naive.”

“It’s a solution. Nothing is perfect.”

“Wrong.” Griffon’s pneuma flared vibrantly, more so than it had been a moment ago and less so than it would be a moment from now. His eyes remained locked on the path ahead of us, but I could tell his mind was back up in the storm crown.

“Nothing down here is perfect,” I amended.

For a long moment Griffon said nothing at all. Then I saw it from the corner of my eye. That ruinous smile.

“Not yet.”

We made it over halfway down the mountain before we caught the eye of someone we couldn’t just run through. Given the state of the mountain and our relative weakness, we’d been fortunate to make it that far at all. After the months we’d spent drawing ire from everyone we could, it was all but inevitable we’d hit such a wall.

He was a stout man in silks the color of rust and dried blood, and his fellow initiates all but flung themselves out of his path as he raced up the mountain to meet us. His stony expression was a foreboding contrast to the screaming fury of his pneuma. He was a captain of the Sophic Realm, and his hoplon shield was covered in blood.

Griffon noticed the approaching cultivator at the same moment I did. He took the man’s measure in an instant and found him wanting, shouting a challenge and leaping down to meet him.

Together, we might have been able to beat him. With Prometheus’ golden blood coursing through me, I felt like I could beat anyone on that mountain. Even if I couldn’t, I had half a mind to try.

Fortunately, it was only half a mind.

Griffon trusted me to watch his flank while he engaged, and so he was entirely unprepared for me to pivot and tackle him off the mountain path before he could engage with the captain from the Infernal Frenzy Cult. Griffon shouted in outrage, our pursuer moved to capitalize on our distraction, and I finished drawing the raven’s mantle over my head.

I stepped into the shadow of a mountain grotto and left the sophic captain to his carnage.

The tempered mantle of the raven did more than just unsettle those who looked upon it. Prior to our trip to Thracia, our black rags had only resembled shadows. Likewise, our ability to step through shadows had been little more than a trick of the light. It was camouflage – exceptionally good camouflage, but in the end only that.

Thracia had changed that. Stepping through the shadows of the Orphic House had been an eye opening experience in more ways than one. Among the many things I’d taken with me from that place, this was one of the most useful.

Griffon and I moved like ghosts through the shadows of Kaukoso Mons. So long as we stayed immersed we were utterly undetectable, even to the other crows we found skulking around in search of easy targets. It forced us to move slower, more methodically, but not agonizingly so.

The shadows of the men and women brawling on the mountain were closed off to us for reasons I couldn’t explain, but in the burning light of dusk we had more than enough mountain crags and grottos to make our way down unbothered.

We were nearly there when Griffon spoke up, scaring the ragged assassin we were creeping by half to death in the process.

“A problem remains.”

I seized the crow and clamped my hand over their mouth before they could scream. I rifled through their rags with my other hand in search of weapons, and it was then I discovered another boon the raven’s tempered mantle had afforded me. Before, Griffon and I had been forced to wait for our captive’s ink-black essence to reveal itself of its own accord.

Now, my hand closed around a bird’s delicate frame and drew it from the assassin’s rags. The man I was holding spasmed, and the ink-black construct of pneuma began to shriek as soon as I pulled it free.

I crushed the crow’s skull with my teeth and tore its head free, chewing methodically. My nose wrinkled. How could Sorea stand this taste?

“I’m listening,” I said, offering Griffon the rest of the crow construct and tossing the assassin out of the shadows. He fell in a heap among a group of senior philosophers that were cutting each other to bloody shreds with nothing more than vicious rhetoric, and after a startled beat the sophists turned away from one another and swarmed the ragged crow.

“This venture relies entirely on Polyzalus’ love for his wife,” Griffon said after he’d swallowed down his share. “It relies on the nectar.”

I looked sharply at him. After all we’d just seen? “You think the brew is bad?”

“No. I think it’s exactly what it was intended to be.”

Ah. “You think Socrates lied to Selene?”

“I think some things are worth seeing for ourselves.”

I grimaced. Even if the nectar we’d brewed was pure, who was to say it would actually heal the Oracle? It was a fair concern. One we could test.

“Fine,” I said, resigned. “We’ll decide it with dice. Loser gets stabbed and takes a sip from the cup.”

Griffon chuckled and abruptly changed course, bounding through the shadows towards a nearby marble building.

“I have a better idea.”

We emerged from the shadows in the middle of a triage under siege. This had been a physician’s ordered domain once, I could tell, but it had been swept up in the day’s chaos as surely as the rest of the cult. Every upright cot and bed was occupied, some of them with two or three injured cultivators occupying them depending on size. Nearly as many of the cots had been knocked over in the chaos, though, spilling their patients out onto the bloodied marble floors.

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From the split second of screaming I heard before we revealed ourselves, I gathered the gist of things – the physicians had taken in as many wounded as they could when the brawl first began, but they’d rapidly run out of space and materials and tried to lock the place down. The assailants that had forced their way in were a mix of cultivators both genuine and dishonest. Some of them were fighting for what remained of the medical supplies so they could help their downed friends. Others were aiming to exploit the chaos and cut down their bed-ridden rivals.

All of them, physicians and patients and assailants alike, froze like frightened deer when Griffon and I stepped out of the shadows cast by a privacy curtain in the center of the triage. It only lasted a second.

Griffon and I made full use of that time. Twenty-nine scarlet hands exploded from Griffon’s soul and flooded the triage unit with their light. I drew my bronze spear from the raven’s cloak and drew it back like it was a javelin, pointing a damning finger at a kind-looking woman whose eyes had been manically locked on an unconscious patient before we’d unveiled ourselves. She dropped the short blade she’d been holding in both hands and I pivoted, flinging the spear as hard as I could at another cultivator that had a physician pinned to the bloody marble.

The man lunged to the side and my spear took him through the left shoulder and nailed him to the column ten feet behind where he’d been.

Griffon stalked up and down the rows of patients while I cleared out the rest of the invaders. His pankration hands darted around the room, some of them assisting with the expulsion but most of them falling upon the patients and wounded doctors. A few of them flinched and screamed, a few more tried to fling themselves from their beds to get away from him, but he would not be denied. One by one he took them in his hands, and one by one their protests went quiet after only a few moments.

When the last of the assailants had been banished from the healing house, I turned and beheld a miracle in motion.

Griffon stood over the bed of a crumpled woman while the rest of his hands flooded the triage with healing light. Bruises were smoothed away like they were smudges of mud, minor cuts were mended in an instant and more serious gauges were sewed shut by deft hands of corporeal pneuma. Other injuries that couldn’t be seen by an external eye were nonetheless mended, patients suddenly breathing easier with scarlet limbs pressed to their chests, color returning to gaunt faces as if he’d siphoned the rosy light of dawn from his soul and into their flesh.