1.135

When the Despoiled Queen of the Amazons let fly her blind arrow, starry night seeped through the skies above the City of Olympia and beyond it. For those unfortunate enough to still be in the city, it was an instantaneous shift. For those that had taken the Raging Heaven Cult’s earlier unrest for the warning that it was, fleeing the city with their most valuable possessions bundled up in carts and carried on their backs, the sunset lights were ripped away like a tablecloth to reveal the dark heavens behind it. Further beyond that, on the Ionian Sea, it spilled across the horizon like the Father had turned out his cup.

Aboard the unwieldy Alikonia, the excited buzz of conversation between Nikolas Aetos’ companions died a swift death as they noticed the dark tide bearing down on them. By the time the lesser cultivators in the company had the presence of mind to look, the setting sun at their backs had already been swallowed up.

“Niko,” the Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss whispered. Her younger siblings and her tagalong slave were too frightened to speak. “What just happened?”

The Stark Blade of the Aetos family had already gathered his youngest cousins loosely to him. Now he leaned over them protectively, one hand falling to the hilt of his sword as he stared out past the ship’s bow.

“Was that-?” One of the heroes clustered around the Sand Reckoner squinted up at the stars above, like the answer was written there in small print.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” another immediately shut them down. “You’re just not… looking… hard enough…” Their voice slowly trailed away.

“The moon is gone,” the Heroine Iphys quietly observed.

“Thalestris?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s gone.”

“Why would she ever? In the middle of the city, now of all times, with every hero there just itching for their shot?”

“Then where is it?”

They bickered on like this until it became apparent they wouldn’t reach a consensus alone.

“Niko,” said a Heroine with features like autumn leaves, silencing the back-and-forth. “What do you think?”

The Stark Blade gathered his heavy pneuma around his cousins like a cloak. Blue eyes burning bright, he spoke.

“I think-”

Light.

Every Heroic cultivator on the ship lit up in alarm, their pneuma spilling across the deck of the Alikonia and threatening the lives of all its lesser passengers. The cloak of the Stark Blade’s own pneuma acted as an inadvertent shield to the three Civic cultivators piled up in his lap. The girl that had begged to be taken along in pursuit of the Young Miss nearly died on the spot – would have died, had the Sand Reckoner not snapped his fingers and caused the planks she was sitting on to cave in, sending her plummeting down into the safety of the ship’s lower quarters.

Those left above deck stared in naked alarm at the grim horizon. Wary hands reached for any weapon they could find.

In the distance, originating from a point they still couldn’t see from this distance, a pillar of light too large to be believed rose from earth up to the heavens and burnt away a ring of clouds ten leagues across in its passing. It lit up the world, bright and all-encompassing as the sun, but harsher – its stark glow was as much lightning as it was dawn.

It cast long shadows across the Free Mediterranean, resonating with a long-forgotten purpose.

It said this was the end.

Unnoticed by his stricken passengers, the Sand Reckoner clicked his tongue and scrubbed a charcoal circle off the deck with the heel of his hand.

“He always gets his way.”

The Young Griffon

It was more than just a sword.

Glaring lights and coronating heat scoured the broken city around me in a circle wide enough to build a second stadium upon. In the time it took me to rip the blade from its sheath in a rising parry, it reached out and consumed everything but the earth itself within that circle. It made no sound at all. It was deafening.

The Flame’s golden ichor screamed an outraged warning in my veins, abandoning all its current refinement and converging on the covetous invader. Its efforts were in vain. From the moment my late uncle’s blade had cleared its sheath, it had turned its edge upon everything within reach.

My soul was no exception.

The blade howled, and it devoured. In the time it took to follow through with my parry, it took more from me than any mundane sword was capable of taking. I felt my boiling blood sublimate in my veins and vanish. In the time it took me to lower the blade to a ready position, it took twice that much again.

It was said that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be ten thousand years old if the Fates were kind enough to allow it. By that measure, as a second rank Philosopher I had two thousand years worth of vitality flowing through my veins.

In the time it took the blade to rise and fall, it stripped decades off my life.

“You’ll die!” the golden ichor warned me in Niko’s voice. I straightened up, standing tall and rolling my shoulders.

“Sheathe it! Don’t you understand? You’ll die! You’ll die! You’ll die!”

As if I hadn’t known that from the start.

The blade was polished bronze, double-edged and forged in the style of a one-handed xiphos but longer than a greatsword. Looking at it was like staring at the sun back when its light could still blind me. It cast off heat and stark light in relentless shockwave currents, yet somehow, paradoxically, it drew everything around it into its gleaming surface.

In manic hilarity, a distant portion of me noted that the blade perhaps most deserving of decoration had been left all but bare. Its only ornament was a pair of words inscribed into the base near its hilt, the script too small and plainly etched to be pleasing to the eye.

ϝάνακτος καταρϝος

The King’s Curse.

The wanton blade drank my heart’s blood greedily, exacting its terrible price for daring to wield it as my own. It took decades from me as I stood in the inverted eye of its scouring storm. It took centuries.

By the time I turned my eyes upon my enemy, a third of my future was gone.

Reunited with her body, Elissa looked at me with wild eyes. Half-crouching and half-sprawled at the edge of the blade’s scouring pillar, the desert heat wavered behind her eyes. For the moment, she was terrified beyond action. The sound that I had parried was nothing more than an echo of her sword, yet somehow the bronze blade shaking in her hands had been severed halfway up its length. As she shook, a vertical line appeared in the center of her forehead and parted, weeping blood that split at the bridge of her nose and carried on in two trails.

The rest of them were just as stricken. The King’s Curse staggered them all, scattering them with its terrible presence even as it drew them in.

There was Kyno to my right, overshadowed now by the gargantuan Sah-Bakari, the virtuous beast looming over him like a protective mother. I saw Lefteris to my left, his mangled fingers just out of reach of his discarded bow. His lips moved soundlessly as he looked upon me, unable to make sense of it. Anastasia’s hunting hounds shrank back from the pillar, whimpering in terror, while the Caustic Queen herself hid somewhere out of sight.

Sol and Selene crouched behind me, well beyond the pillar’s reach. Two rosy palms had struck the scarlet Heroine in center mass and flung her out of harm’s way. The remaining twenty-eight had just barely been strong enough to send the Roman skidding out to join her.

Not far enough. The drilling column of coronating power wasn’t a boundary for the blade – it was only a declaration of its intent. The King’s Curse reached beyond it, taking from my brother and from Selene, taking from the Heroes arrayed against us, and reaching further across the ruined City of Olympia to take from ever more. Standing at its starving center, it consumed me most rabidly of all.

One was enough. Presumptuous, ugly blade, I didn’t say you could have them all.

I hammered down on it with all that I was, everything I would ever have to give, and the King’s Curse ate that too. It drew me in. It made me a part of it, a portion of a greater whole.

As it drank me dry, I saw the world as it perceived it.

Olympia was dying. It had been gutted by my brother, scarred by the wayward acts of Tyrants, and burnt out at its heart by unworthy champions. The King’s Curse swept over them all, enveloping them in the shadow of its ceaseless hunger as it expanded.

The Heroes – no, the animals still inside of the Olympic Stadium, were ripping themselves limb-from-limb with techniques that should have leveled the city three times over by now. The reason why that hadn’t happened – the reason why the stadium was still standing at all – was invisible to me, but plainly apparent to my wanton blade. I looked through its eyes and saw it for myself.

A wretched captain of the third realm shouted his bloodthirsty defiance as four lesser dogs converged on him from every cardinal direction.

The captain burned seventeen years along with one more spring and summer from the end of his life, distilling that down to pure potential, time, and instantly transmuting it to magnitude. His beating heart supplied the burning fuel, his mind supplied the question of what would be done with it, and the instinct in his gut gave him the answer.

The wretched captain’s soul was built on foundations of speckled limestone, worn down and made smooth by the ceaseless crashing of broken tides. Its load-bearing colonnades were stout and ugly things, all ten of them pockmarked principles of aimless violence. The statues dedicated to his fulminating acts were little better – every one of them a brutal culling. The captain’s soul was a monument to cruelty without purpose.

The barking dog chose one of ten acts that had defined him, the slaying of a terrible virtuous beast. Though an entire settlement had lent him their spears along with their fathers and sons to see it done, he had taken all the credit as his own as the battle’s sole survivor. As such, the ability manifested in two parts – one, a cloud of sea spray that drowned all those who inhaled it, and the other, a protective ring of seven hundred and thirty-two bristling spears. One for every son and father that had died to mauling or to drowning while they held the beast in place for him.

When the wretched captain of the third realm invoked that act and burnt his heart’s blood, he proposed a question: If I could live this moment for seventeen years, plus another spring and one more summer, how much greater could that act have been?

This was how cultivators in the third realm empowered themselves beyond the boundaries of their station. As a result, the wretched captain’s sea spray strike exploded from his every pore, not simply drowning those who breathed it in unprepared, but also blinding them with salt that melted their eyes in their sockets, seizing them in riptide currents that halted their momentum, and wearing away the flesh from their bones as though they’d spent the better part of twenty years ravaged by constant crashing waves.

It was a common use of passion. At the same time that the captain was doing this, the four lesser dogs arrayed against him were doing much the same. One offered up twenty-four and a half years of their lifespan to empower their motion, dancing through the worst of the spray with impossible grace. Another offered forty-seven years and a single cloudless night to empower the magnitude of their manifested shield, blocking not just the sea spray’s ability to blind and grind flesh from bone, but also blocking the imposition of the act – protecting him, impossibly, from the label of beast that the captain’s act imposed, and thus negating its ability to drown him. Another still gave up exactly one century in order to lend her sling enough force for its iron orb projectile to punch through anything short of adamant.

The last of the four, and the runt of their unsightly litter without any greater mystery to inspire his foundations, burned with an insecurity backed by personal hatred of his opponent. This one set fire to twenty thousand years, and he gave it all to his dagger before he threw it. It left him defenseless while the knife spun unerringly for the wretched captain’s heart, coated in hateful poison that was potent enough to kill a man on the thirty-fourth step towards divinity.

By all standard measures, the wretched captain should have been ripped apart by his lessers. He was outnumbered and had sacrificed the least of all of them for his technique.

However, the captain had not called upon a standard act. How could the effects of its empowerment be anything but warped as a result?

The four leaping dogs had accounted for the empowerment of his sea spray, but not his secondary attack. When the wretched captain offered up time to empower his deed, he gained more than he should have from the exchange. More than just his own impossible efforts, taken from the future and condensed down to this moment. More than that, he gained the efforts of the settlement’s sons and fathers too.

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Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to devote themselves to their spears. Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to reach their full maturation, to raise their sons that had been too young to aid the captain on that day. Seventeen years, plus one spring and another summer for those seven hundred and thirty-two men to have more sons, and to raise them for this singular purpose.

This was not an act of passion. The King’s Curse recognized it for what it was: an echo of the fourth realm. And because the King’s Curse knew it, so did I.

The wretched captain offered up three thousand six hundred and ninety-four tortured souls, fathers and sons that had died to protect their home along with an entire generation of their unborn heirs. Of the four lesser dogs converging on the captain, only the runt that had sacrificed twenty thousands years to his knife was unsurprised by the second layer of the attack.

Three thousand six hundred and ninety-four spears exploded from the sea spray, skewering the four challengers from every possible angle. Three died instantly, their techniques and the last of their vitality leaving their corpses in a destructive rush. The runt alone clung stubbornly to life, unable to move but determined to watch as his tumbling knife sank into the captain’s chest.

The wretched captain’s breastplate, another product of toil not his own, stopped the dagger with only a sliver of its tip pressed into his skin. The captain plucked it out and sauntered over to the runt, twirling it between his fingers. He said something cruel and unimportant, then buried the knife to its hilt in the lesser dog’s neck.

A moment later he collapsed screaming to the sand, scrabbling at his breastplate where it covered his heart. The runt, suspended above the captain by the spears of his father, his brothers, and all their tortured neighbors, hocked and spat bloody spittle onto the writhing captain’s face.

The wretched dog ripped the breastplate from his chest, revealing a rugged torso marred by ugly inflammation. The runt couldn’t speak, skewered as he was by spears and his own poisoned knife, but with the voice of his soul he whispered something spiteful and unimportant down at the captain.

In response, the captain drove his own fingers into his chest, breaking past his ribs and taking hold of his heart. He howled in terror and outrage, pulling, and they both vanished beneath the light of tribulation lightning.

Similar scenes played out across the bloody sand pit, and the Olympic Stadium contained them all. The King’s Curse knew why. Though the walls of the stadium, such as they were – less walls and more an ascending spiral ramp, with each layer supported by statues of past champions rather than traditional load-bearing columns – appeared to my eyes to be more form than they were function, the truth was entirely different. The spirit lime chosen for the load-bearing statues was durable in a way that defied the rules of nature, relying upon the legacy of the former champions whose shapes it had taken to retain its shape and resist external wear.

No matter what havoc the animals inside the pit unleashed, they were all of them lesser than the Champions that had brought glory to those sands before them. So long as that was true, the stadium’s walls would never fall. Nothing would trespass them. It was one of the most remarkable feats of architecture that this world had ever seen – the King’s Curse knew that with authority, and so I knew it too.

While my mind was there in the pit, observing that madness, it was a thousand other places at the same time. I was made aware of countless revolting scenes playing out in the crumbling ruin of a city that had once been without equal. And as I watched through the wanton blade’s awareness, I understood something pivotal. Whatever the King’s Curse could perceive, it could eat.

On the distant mountain beneath the Storm That Never Ceased, eight Tyrants were laid bare before my borrowed senses. I understood them with the same vivid clarity that I had understood the third realm animals down in the pit. The soul of a fourth realm cultivator was exponentially more complex than those of the third realm, but to the King’s Curse it was like comparing a child’s aimless scribbles to a student’s sloppy imitation. It was all the same.

Foundations warped – tempered, my dwindling voice whispered – by greater mysteries. Ten pillars of load-bearing principle. Ten statues dedicated to legendary deeds. And above it all, a sloping dome roof, each Tyrant’s formed from a different material. Gold for the sullen King of Setting Suns, Pewter for the lying Queen of the Amazons, and so on and so forth. Regardless of their composition, all of them blocked out the skies above their souls. On the inside of those domed roofs, each of them had painted a mural of their dominion.

Men, women, and children huddled beneath these roofs in their hundreds and their thousands, bound by purpose and shackled to the pillars and the statues.