1.130 [An Unkindness]

“One was more than enough.”

An Unkindness

The Scarlet City falls fully into chaos by the time the Rosy Dawn’s pillars emerge from their closed doors cultivation.

The people of the valley are crude souls by and large. Citizens enjoy places of prominence in the city’s bureaucracy, such is their supremacy, and whenever a philosopher’s sets foot in the city’s humble agora it is nearly a certainty that they will be a scholar of the city’s greater mystery cults. In Alikos, as is the case in most every city state aside from the Coast, the people are defined by their greater mystery cults. No matter an Alikon’s standing, the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk are their pride.

Beyond that, it is the case that many fathers and mothers living in the valley have sons and daughters living up above in one of the two cults. So when initiates of the Rosy Dawn come spilling down the mountain in a horrible frenzy, the panic that erupts is parental as much as it is patriotic.

Only a few minutes after the Young Miss dives into the Ionian Sea, mystikos from the Rosy Dawn descend from the eastern mountain range and run screaming through the streets of Alikos. There is no order to it, only a wild purpose. Lydia Aetos didn’t spring from her bed straight into the sea – her peers had watched her crest the mountain on her way back from the city, and so they retrace her steps as best as they can. They scour the Scarlet City for a reason, a threat, anything to explain the Young Miss’ sudden mania.

Even the most frantic of them are not bold enough to trespass in the Sand Reckoner’s paltry estate, and because of that not one of them finds the answer to their question. All they manage to do is pass along their panic to those below.

In the end, it is the Burning Dusk that seeks to control the situation. Scholars of Burning Dusk stream down the western mountain range just like their peers across the valley, but there is no confusion in their ranks. Citizens and Philosophers alike move through the city with clear purpose, soothing the people of the valley and stopping short their peers from the Rosy Dawn.

It is Gianni Scala’s unseen authority that guides them at first, but when the altercations between rival cultivators turn violent in the streets, it is Gianni Scala himself that takes the situation in hand.

It has been nearly twenty years since the kyrios of the Burning Dusk walked through the valley without a destination in his mind, but there is only so long that he can stare an opportunity in the eye before he blinks. In nearly twenty years the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn, Damon Aetos, has never once allowed his control of the city to slip. The Tyrant of the Burning Dusk knows it may well be another twenty years before he is afforded another chance like this – a chance to undermine the kyrios’ stranglehold over the island.

Unfortunately, the Tyrant’s timing is the worst it could have possibly been. Had he acted just a few minutes earlier, he could have swept aside every conflict and planted his image in the minds of every citizen, metic, and freedman as the steady order to contrast Damon Aetos’ chaotic frenzy.

And had he waited just a few minutes longer, he would have seen the pillars of the Rosy Dawn emerge from behind closed doors before it was too late to turn back.

All of Gianni’s work is undone three times in quick succession – once when the horrible rage of Fotios and Raisa Aetos flares like spread wings across the city, blinding the people of the valley and its lesser cultivators like they’d spent all afternoon staring into the sun. The screaming panic that follows has only just reached its peak when his work is undone again, this time by the wrath of Stavros and Chryse Aetos.

Turning back now, fleeing at the mere suggestion of cultivators that should only exist beneath him, would be to unmake all that he is – unmake what little of him remains. Gianni Scala has no choice but to stay his course. Even then, he is damned.

Shortly thereafter, the Tyrant of the Burning Dusk watches four Heroic Captains descend like falling stars into the valley city, and wonders why he even bothered at all.

Atop the eastern mountain range, Damon Aetos snuffs out the frenzy overtaking his cult like a candle pinched between his fingers. The humbled wise men carry his word through the estates and pavilions, and as abruptly as it came, the mania is gone. The kyrios is here, the wise men assure their juniors. Everything is under control.

It is a long while after that when Heron Aetos finally finds his uncle. The kyrios is in a somber hall forbidden from even the most talented members of the cult. It’s a place that only the scions of the Aetos family are allowed to enter.

Heron approaches hesitantly. He waits until his uncle acknowledges his presence, and only then does he kneel by his side.

The solemn statue of Anargyros Aetos stares dauntlessly ahead. Like many of the statues in this hall, there is a gap where his eyes should be. That isn’t what gives Heron pause. He’s been here before, seen his late uncle’s unsettling stone face and looked upon his empty eyes. That isn’t new.

Heron hesitates because the statue’s eye sockets aren’t empty anymore. His uncle has placed a candle in each of them, one of which is burning steadily away.

“I told you to go with your cousin,” Damon says.

“I did. He told me to track down Rena while he handled Castor, but…” Heron struggles to find the words. “She was inconsolable. I was still trying to snap her out of it when Niko came down the mountain with all of his friends and Castor… and the Sand Reckoner.”

Heron’s uncle doesn’t say a word. The silence is worse than the outrage he’d imagined.

“They left, uncle. All of them. The Sand Reckoner had a ship tucked away in his rags, and Niko – he took Rena and Castor and-“

Heron freezes as warmth like a mid-summer breeze sweeps over him, passing like a wave through the hallowed halls of the Aetos memorial and carrying with it a rosy light that chases away every mournful shadow. He watches cautiously, wondering what his uncle is doing and why, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. The kyrios reaches for the second candle in his brother’s empty marble socket, the one yet to burn, and lights it.

“Why are you here, nephew?” Damon Aetos asks quietly. Heron grips the vestments of his status as a young pillar, unable to look his uncle in the eyes but unwilling to look away entirely.

“The Rosy Dawn needs an heir.” Here and now, the words don’t sound half as noble as they had in his head. His uncle’s silence is a damning confirmation of that.

Heron stands, feeling like a stranger in his own home, and his voice cracks as he passes on the last of his news. “The Sand Reckoner, he told me to ask you-”

“I know.”

What else is there to say? The last of the young pillars flees his uncle’s judgment.

“Ask him if he’s checked his math.”

The Young Miss-tocrat

Terror for her youngest cousin is what drives Lydia Aetos to dive into the sea and swim after a ship that is already near the horizon. Terror, in turn, is what gives her limbs strength they’ve never had before, allowing her to cut through the waves faster than any of her Civic peers. It’s this terror that clouds her senses, and it’s the terror that doesn’t abate. She knows that it won’t until she sees Myron safe.

Even so, the longer she fights against the current of the Ionian, the more her frantic mind adapts to the terror. It hunts her like a hound, but after some time the Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn is able to separate herself from it and consider her situation.

There are no ships in the Scarlet City’s docks, but it was folly all the same to dive in alone without even an explanation for her fellow initiates. Lydia understands that. There’s no telling when the pillars of the Rosy Dawn will emerge from their closed doors cultivation, but their absence doesn’t make Lydia the fastest swimmer in the city by default. There are dozens of cultivators in the Scarlet City that stand entire realms above her.

It isn’t quite that simple. Convincing any member of the Burning Dusk to act on Myron’s behalf was a risk, one Lydia had immediately deemed unworthy of the time it would take to try. Yet that still left the members of her own cult, the wise men and the proud senior mystikos of the Rosy Dawn. Lydia could have enlisted their help, she knows.

And therein she finds the problem. Even now, she can’t shake his influence.

Lydia remembers the words her fiancé spoke to her so many years ago, then as now with unshakable confidence.

They’re all worthless, every wretched one. Now that Niko is gone, there isn’t a single Sophist in this cult that’s worth your wasted breath. Ignore them. Their help is worth nothing – their judgment even less.

Lydia disregards the senior initiates of the cult out of instinct planted in her mind by Griffon. It’s only after the coast of Alikos has shrunk to a thin sliver on the horizon behind her that she’s finally able to admit it to herself. Was it the right impulse? Has she doomed herself and her littlest cousin both?

It hardly matters now. Lydia gasps through every stroke, pushing her body to the limits of its strength. No matter how far she goes, though, the ship is never any closer. It only grows more distant.

When the distant speck of the ship vanishes entirely beyond the horizon line, Lydia is left alone in the Ionian. She screams in frustration and terror, wasting precious pneuma, and wrings her body out like a wet cloth. Faster. She has to be faster.

Without the visible marker of the ship to guide her, Lydia searches desperately through her accumulated knowledge for a way to keep her path straight. She can swim twice as fast as Myron’s ship, and it will be worthless if she loses her sense of direction and strays the wrong way. She seizes upon nautical tricks every Aetos learns from a young age and discards them just as quickly.

In the end, she finds the answer in her first mistake. The terror – specifically, the frantic, gasping panic it had thrown her into.

Lydia stops swimming and allows herself to float, forcing her breathing under control even as her little cousin gets further away. She falls back on her breathing technique passed down to her by the Sand Reckoner. She allows it to whirl throughout her body in a forever tightening spiral. A perfect, golden thing. Endlessly converging.

Endlessly predictable.

Once, when she was still new to his tutelage and more frustrated than she was reverent, Lydia had thrown a fit in Archimedes’ estate and demanded to know why she could never land a hit on him no matter how she tried. The old philosopher had slapped her upside her head for making a mess of his mess, and revealed a secret that cultivators ten times her age would have killed for without any particular fanfare.

Fool girl. Your every action leaves behind a golden thread: so long as I know where you’ve been, you’ll never hide from me the way you’re going.

It isn’t an application of the spiral breathing technique that she’s even considered before this moment, but the theory is sound and her refinement shines true. Lydia’s awareness of her own pneuma spirals outward behind her, tracing her path all the way back to the shores of the Scarlet City. Ahead of her, it spirals out in reverse, tightening and narrowing into a single point over the horizon.

Lydia cuts through the waves with renewed purpose and clear direction, maintaining steady breaths all the while.

Unfortunately, direction is only one of two parts required.

Lydia’s only indications that her body is slowing are the setting sun and the passage of her awareness through the golden rings of her spiral path. Neither registers to her senses. Such is her single-minded focus that she doesn’t notice her body has given out until she dips her head beneath the waves for another forward stroke and finds she doesn’t have the strength to pull herself back up for air after.

As she sinks into the depths of the Ionian, warmth and light like dawn breaking beneath the waves illuminate the darkest depths of the Ionian Sea. In that moment, Lydia sees with her own eyes the myriad reasons why even the strongest cultivators build ships to cross the seas. And those myriad reasons see her in turn.

The warm light passes her by. The Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn falls deeper into the depths.

When something seizes her by the neck, Lydia turns what remains of her strength upon the creature. She bites and she claws, but it’s like scrabbling at a stone. The creature ignores her efforts, overpowering her without effort, and drags her…

Up?

Lydia gasps explosively as she’s dragged up out of the Ionian, blinking salt water from her eyes and struggling to resolve the blurry image of the creature – no, the man that had saved her.

“Niko?” She chokes out between sputtering coughs. Sky blue flames dance in her swimming vision.

“I can’t decide which of you is the bigger fool anymore,” her cousin says, furious and relieved. He springs from the sea, taking her with him.

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The setting sun and salt water spray burns her eyes blind. Lydia doesn’t realize her cousin came after her on a ship until it’s looming like a mountain in front of her face. Through the sun and the spray she can only make out a vast watercolor silhouette. Her first delirious thought is that Niko had taken them all the way back to land in a single leap. After all, how could any ship be this large?

They hit the wooden deck a moment later, and Lydia hardly has time to clear her eyes before she’s tackled onto her back.

“Why!?” Rena wails, burying her face in Lydia’s neck. “Why would you do that?”

“Foolishness,” Castor reprimands her, his voice a cruel, whip crack. “What were you thinking? Aside from nothing at all!” Despite his words, his eyes are wet as they scan her up and down for injuries. Both of them hold on like they expect her to go up and smoke the moment they let go.

Lydia stares up at the scarlet banners of over a dozen sails. She strokes her sister’s head and rubs her brother’s back with hands that tremble from her overwhelming fatigue, and she takes in as much of the ship as she can without turning her head.

To call it a ship at all is a mistake, she realizes. It’s closer to a floating city. In fact, how does it float at all?

“What is this?” she rasps. Her little sister’s wailing drowns it out, but she’s heard nonetheless.

“The Alikonia,” Niko answers, appearing in her vision and bringing a water skin to her lips. Lydia drinks deeply from it, only then feeling her monstrous thirst.

“That’s a terrible name for a ship,” the Young Miss mutters in between greedy swallows.

Niko snorts, glancing off to the side. “Be grateful he named it anything at all.”

Lydia follows her older cousin’s gaze, and sees Archimedes scribbling feverishly onto the ship’s deck with his compass and his stick of charcoal. He’s surrounded by Niko’s Heroic companions – each of them looks livelier than she’s seen them since the night of the wedding. As she watches, the one that looks most at home on a ship leans over the Sand Reckoner’s shoulder and points inquisitively at a circle left half-drawn. Before the Hero can fully vocalize his question, the old Philosopher turns his head and bites the Hero’s hand.

The Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss feels some of the tension unfurl within her heart, watching the gaudy pirate Hero yelp and holler at the old wise man while the rest of his companions heckle and laugh. As she watches, a few of them shoot her winks and casual waves. Eight Heroic cultivators, counting Niko, and somehow the Sand Reckoner himself.

Idly, her eyes trail past the group and settle on a frail figure, hunched miserably beneath one of the ship’s many masts and clutching a bucket for dear life. Somehow, Athis looks even worse than Lydia feels. The slave girl smiles weakly when their eyes meet, her relief clear from across the deck, and then the Alikonia dips into a large wave and the girl’s eyes cross. Athis wretches loudly into her bucket.

“What is this?” Lydia asks again. It’s all so surreal that she begins to wonder if she drowned after all.

Niko sits by her head, one leg folded underneath him and the other stretching out. Had his legs always been that long? The odd thought vanishes from her mind when she sees the expression on his face.

Now that Lydia is safe, Niko’s fury is gone. In its place is a razor sharp focus. It’s a look she’s been waiting to see on her cousin’s face since the day Griffon ran away.

“I’ve decided,” Niko says, enfolding each of them in the comforting bonfire of his presence. “I’ve been living in the past ever since I came home. It’s high time I get to know the thoughtless people my cousins have become.”