1.133

The Son of Rome

The mask settled with its painted features facing up, angled so that the distraught woman seemed to wail up at its owner. Griffon stared at it in numb despair.

We were out of time.

Scythas appeared in our path, his long hair whipping in the wind. His passage through the storm crown was written all across his frame. Thin, branching scars covered his visible skin, raw red remnants of tribulation wrath. His grass-green cult attire was drenched by blood and rainwater, torn in so many places it hardly looked like a single piece anymore. Far worse than any of those wounds, though, was the look on his face. My heart hammered double-time in my chest.

“Solus,” he said, begging me with broken eyes, “what are you doing?”

Ah.

Selene pushed up from the ground with one arm, the other reaching slowly for her fold in paradox logic where she kept her spear. She eyed the Hero of the Scything Squall carefully. When she spoke, her words were more than just soothing. Whether she did it consciously or not, I tracked the motion of her pneuma as it coated her words and reached out across the gap between them.

“Scythas, this isn’t-“

“Quiet,” he hissed, and stole the wind from her voice. Burning hazel eyes rooted me in place. This time he demanded answers from me. “What is this? What happened to the Oracle? What happened to the alliance? Why are you running away?”

There were more. Five cultivators in the first rank of the Heroic realm converged on us like a closing snare. I exhaled slowly, steadying myself. My heart beat faster still, cold dread warring with golden heat in my chest.

The Heroes arrived one by one. Elissa landed beside Scythas with her bronze blade already drawn. Her scarred face was twisted by furious accusation. Jason landed in a heavy crouch between us and them, the pressure of his panicked pneuma pulverizing every stone within arms reach. The carved stones dangling from his necklaces rattled against his breast plate as he shifted back-and-forth, uncertainty pulling him in two directions.

Kyno touched down lightly beside Elissa, throwing off steam like a forge from his crocodile cloak. The crocodile’s maw hung low, obscuring his eyes. The tightening of his jaw and the clenching of his fists as he looked down at Griffon said more than enough. Anastasia arrived, not from above, but from the side. She came striding out to join us from the shadows of a nearby alley – or what remained of it. A widow’s black veil covered her face. She had her javelin in hand, burning with caustic heat.

Déjà vu tilted the world around me. We were facing opposite directions, but there was no doubt in my mind. It was the same alley, and this was the same pavilion.

“Heaven beats its drums. Are you ready to dance?”

We only needed one more, and we’d be right back where we started.

I pivoted on my heel an instant before Jason shouted a warning. A line of sensation too bright to be painful drew a line across the bridge of my nose, an arrow that screamed to all of my senses piercing through the earth and promptly vanishing. It carried on faster than I could consciously track until it was gone entirely – burrowing past the lower limits of my sphere’s awareness.

Lefteris descended in wrath, cratering the raised dais that the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had hammered their funeral drums on so many weeks ago. The three fingers he used to draw back his bow string were a bloody ruin. He glared down at Griffon and I, not with suspicion or desperation, but with black unfettered hatred.

The Gold-String Guardian drew another arrow from the gap in his own paradox logic, drawing it back without a word. I saw my death in his eyes. I’d only narrowly dodged the first arrow because of the distance and because I had started pivoting the instant I felt his pneuma shift along the bow’s golden string. If he shot me again, I would be hit. If he shifted his target, Griffon wouldn’t even try to dodge. My heart raced faster still.

Jason and Kyno saved us, converging on either side of the Heroic archer and wrestling his bow away from us. Now the archer spoke, howling at the top of his lungs.

“I told you! I told all of you, at every turn, and you didn’t listen!” His heart’s flame blazed as he fought viciously against the two men restraining him. “I’ll kill you! I’ll tear you apart, leave nothing for your wretched soul to scavenge! I’ll grind your bones to dust!”

“I’d like to see you try,” Jason growled, wrenching his bow arm back.

“Just breathe, Left!” Kyno urged him. Even with the difference in their stature, the hulking man in the crocodile skin was struggling to hold back his friend’s nocking arm. “This isn’t the moment! The boys need you to be-“

Lefteris shouted, grieving as much as he was hating. A lead weight settled in my stomach.

“Solus.” Scythas stepped forward. His pneuma was a mess of jumbled currents, a thousand streams converging on his heart. “Speak to us. Tell us what’s going on.”

“As if we didn’t already know.” Elissa leveled her sword at us, glaring down at Griffon, and her anger swiftly boiled over. “They strummed us like a lyre. From the very beginning, they sang and danced and promised us everything under the sun, never once intending to deliver it. They lied to our faces. They used us as tools.”

“Let the man speak!” Jason shouted. The Sword Song rounded on him.

“Enough of barking dogs!”

Scythas took another step towards us – towards me. Selene crept back, crouching protectively beside Griffon. In the corner of my eye, I saw Anastasia pace a wide circle around us.

“This wasn’t your plan,” Scythas spoke, as if he could manifest the truth of it. I shook my head. “Then why? What happened after you left us in the storm? Why didn’t you bring us with you? Why aren’t you fighting?”

Each question brought him a step closer. Each question brought to my attention another golden path that I had overlooked when it mattered the most. I saw them spiraling out in their hundreds behind each of the six Heroic cultivators – how many paths to victory had I overlooked? How many times had I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?

How many lives had I ended in a single day?

“I took you for a wolf,” Anastasia said softly, audible amidst the violent din only because Scythas delivered the words to me. Her black veil glowed caustic green at its edges. “But now I don’t know what you are. This isn’t how a captain acts – you’ve divided, but left yourself no path to conquer. What is your plan, Solus?”

“Solus,” Selene whispered urgently, eyes flickering from threat to threat.

“Solus!” Jason shouted desperately, while Lefteris seethed and thrashed out of his grip.

“Solus.” Scythas took another step forward.

Manifesting intent was a process that required practice, familiarity, and unshakable focus. I was not my brother, and I was only just now beginning to understand how horribly I had neglected the finer details of my refinement, but I was as focused as I had ever been. I cast out my pneuma, shaping my vital essence to a purpose that I was well familiar with.

My spear intent was a sloppy thing at best, without question a junior philosopher’s first effort, and I watched the bewilderment bloom in their eyes as their senses told them the truth of that. Regardless, it was enough. The spear of my intent manifested in the air just in front of the Hero of the Scything Squall and cut a jagged line through the street.

Scythas stared down at the line, then back up to me. The rest of the five watched intensely. My heart thundered, drowning out all else but this moment. These people.

“No further,” I declared, and Scythas flinched like I had slapped him. “If any of you cross this line, consider your ties to me severed.”

“What?” Scythas asked quietly. I swallowed back my bile.

“The Scarlet Oracle is dead,” I told them, and watched horrified understanding break like the dawn in their eyes. “I had plans for all of this, and for all of you, but none of them matter now.”

“Whose blood is that?” Elissa abruptly asked, leveling her sword at Griffon’s blood-stained hands. When he failed to acknowledge her, the Heroine’s pneuma spiked. “Answer me!”

“It wasn’t his fault.” Selene’s voice wavered, but somehow she held steady above her grief. She stared down the Sword Song resolutely. “My mother took her own life. I swear it on my soul.”

For a moment, the scarred Heroine was lost for words. Her eyes cut into me. “What have you done to this girl?”

“What have you done to us?” Kyno asked.

Anastasia’s head tilted, like she was looking at something incomprehensible. “Who are you, really?”

“What do your tyrants say?” I asked her. Each of them was inundated with the smoke stench of their elder’s influence, and not for the first time I cursed myself for leaving them behind in the storm.

“They say you’re fakers,” Elissa spat.

“Murderers,” Lefteris seethed.

“Sophists.” Kyno’s answer was delivered with the least heat, but it discomforted them all the most. They watched me expectantly, one and all. Even Lefteris held his breath, waiting for me to deny it.

I didn’t.

“Even now!?” Scythas exploded, advancing forward with his fists clenched. “People are dying, Solus! The world is falling down around your ears and you’re still pretending-?”

Gravitas.

The captain’s virtue struck the Hero center mass, sending him skidding back across the line. It didn’t move him much further than that, less than ten paces. I braced myself for the retaliation of the fifth legion. It didn’t come.

I’d found it. Too little too late, but I had found an answer nonetheless.

“… it’s enough.” Scythas hadn’t even been knocked over by my attack, let alone injured, yet his body began to tremble. “Just stop it already.”

“Who are you still trying to fool!?” Jason cried out, lurching to the edge of the dais. “Haven’t we proven ourselves yet? Is this not the moment you’ve been waiting for all this time?”

Olympia was coming apart at its every seam – if the Tyrants kept on as they were, the sanctuary city would be a smoking ruin long before the next dawn broke. Would-be champions were fleeing the conflict in droves, picking off rivals and looting from the dead and dying on their way out of the city. Those left behind in the stadium were trapped in their own bloody crucible, ripping their fellow athletes apart and basking in the victory glow of tribulation lightning – gladiators laying their lives on the line for a crowd of empty seats. An era was ending.

Is this not the moment?

Somehow, it was.

“Last year I was a slave,” I said. Jason shook his head, denying the thought entirely, and the rest weren’t far behind him. I didn’t wait for them to put words to it. “The year before that I was a Legate in command of three thousand men – but not because I had earned it. I was only seventeen years old when I was given that distinction. I’m only twenty years old today.”

“Stop it!” Jason shouted. “Just-!”

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“Anastasia knows.”

The Heroine of the Blind Maiden Cult had known from the beginning. A physician only needed a brief moment of contact to read their patient’s body like a book. From the moment her fingers had brushed across my shoulder in that shadowed alley, Anastasia had known the truth of my age.

Expectation shifted briefly onto the Caustic Queen, imploring her to deny me. Instead, she struck to the heart of it all.

“Age is not a prerequisite for advancement,” she said accusingly. “There have been younger Heroes than you. There have even been younger Tyrants.”

It was my fault. I had no one but myself to blame for this person they had built up in their heads. Every bold-faced lie, every empty promise, all of the false assumptions and misunderstandings – I had allowed them all to pass without clarification. And for what? Because it suited my needs? Because I had thought the matter settled already? Because I was tired of repeating myself, resigned to being misconstrued by flighty Greeks? Excuses. Pitiful, monstrous excuses.

The truth was that even after everything, a part of me had still wanted to be that man. The captain that Gaius had expected me to be, that the fifth legion had needed me to be. A vile, treacherous portion of my soul had yearned for that second chance. After all, I had nothing left to lose. If I succeeded, I could suffer my punishment in the afterlife with dignity. And if I failed, what did it matter?

[Seek safer shores.]

If only I had known it from the start.

“A Legate is worthless without his legion, and mine was slaughtered to a man.” I stated it plainly. They deserved that much, my bright and shining soldiers. “My foundations as a cultivator are split in two. The half of me that is Roman might as well not be a cultivator at all now. The half of me that is Greek entered the Sophic Realm the day before I was made a slave to Damon Aetos.”

Their pneuma rose precipitously, disbelief and betrayal and rage manifesting each in their own unique way. I forged on ahead, dragging all of it out into the light.

“The day I arrived in this city was the same day that the Rosy Dawn’s Young Aristocrat freed me from my shackles. I am exactly what I appear to be. Half a Legate with no legion, and half a Philosopher on his twelfth step to divinity.”

I forced myself not to look away when the light dimmed in Scythas’ eyes.

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Jason clutched his head, his pneuma pressing in as if to crush himself. “I refuse! I won’t believe it!”

“The Rosy Dawn has a Young Aristocrat,” Elissa spoke, and for the first time since her arrival there was no bite to her voice. She was staring at Griffin. Staring at his clean and mended robes.

“Impossible,” Anastasia said immediately. “The hunting bird’s breath is infamous – I would have recognized the Aetos’ mark on him immediately. His channels are shaped for something else entirely.”

“Lio,” Kyno breathed. Lefteris jerked back.

“What!?” the archer demanded. Kyno didn’t respond, staring at the kneeling Sophist in sudden understanding

“Not a lion, nor an eagle.”

A Griffon.

“No,” Anastasia denied it twice, her funeral veil smoking as its edges burned. She slashed at the air with a flat hand, casting the notion aside. “What sort of heir would lack something so fundamental? What kind of father would allow it?”

“What does your Tyrant say?” I asked her again.

“What does it matter?” Scythas asked quietly. “They’re all liars.” I inclined my head, acknowledging the point.

“The things that you’ve said,” the fair Hero from the Hurricane Heights continued, the wind rising slowly as he spoke, “the actions that you’ve taken- those aren’t- they couldn’t have been-“

He struggled for the words. I didn’t know if it was a cruelty or a kindness, but I supplied them in his stead.