1.137 [Scythas]

Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall

There’s still time, but less and less.

You have the stronger heart.

He isn’t what you thought he was. You can bring him down.

You can defeat him.

You must defeat him.

This is your only chance.

My dear hero, you have to move.

You have to fight!

You have to do it now-!

The spear plunged straight through his heart, yet it hardly hurt at all. The Scarlet Oracle’s eyes burned scarlet, glaring into his, and the world spun around him. Scythas was flung, fell, and skipped across marble like a stone over still water. The tumble hurt worse than the stab.

Scythas propped himself up on a scraped and bleeding elbow, prodding at the wound in his chest. Or rather, prodding the place where the wound should have been. Prodding with fingers that should have been longer. Panic stabbed straight through his heart, and there at last he felt the pain. The panic.

“No,” he breathed. His voice was pitched higher than it should’ve been. Higher than it had been in years.

A storm had been raging in the city of Olympia when the Oracle stabbed him with her hallowed spear. Only a moment ago, they had all been in the center of it. Now that storm was gone, another had taken its place. As he watched, it consumed all that remained of the Half-Step City. Everything gave away to the wind until all that remained was the center of the eye.

The Oracle stepped past him. Scythas lunged for her trailing skirt in terror.

“Please!” he cried out in a child’s helpless panic. “Not this! Anything, but this!”

His body didn’t move as it should have, too small to accommodate his mind’s demands. She slipped through his fingers and carried on towards the edge of the eye. The world beyond it was opaque, nothing more than a screaming wall of hurricane winds.

“Selene! Don’t leave me here!” he wailed, hating how familiar it felt to sob the words into the wind.

“I warned you, cultivator.” The words were melancholy, but the sun-kissed Heroine didn’t look back once. “I never cured your heart, only cut away the symptoms – you should have cleaned the wound. But you didn’t. You made no offerings and swore no oaths.”

The Oracle cast out her empty hand like she was tossing something away.

“I see now that it wasn’t mine to take.”

He didn’t want it back. He had no room for it in his heart – a new hurt had already sprung up to take its place. The rot she’d taken from him in Thracia would make the burden double.

“That isn’t fair.” He stumbled and crawled across the broken tiles. She was already gone. He screamed brokenly into the wind, “That isn’t fair!”

Even here, the wind carried her parting words to his ear.

“Once given and twice returned.”

As the Oracle vanished through the storm, a hand latched onto his thigh.

Scythas screamed and lurched away from it. His grass-green silks, still vibrant and new, tore away in the wind’s invisible grip. Another hand seized onto his ankle and tripped him up when he tried to run. Another settled on his shoulder and pressed him down. Two gripped his hips, ripping more and more of his silks away.

He thrashed and he struggled, calling upon his pneuma and the wind, but that only made the storm beyond the eye howl louder. He slipped out of his silks piece by piece, but the formless hands of wind only seized upon his skin, scratching bloody furrows through his flesh when he fought them.

“Urania!” Scythas called out to a Muse that had yet to claim him when he was still this young. He begged the heavenly diviner, “Help me! Please! Show me the way! Urania!”

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“I’m here,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against his. The relief was so powerful it nearly knocked him back down to the floor. A moment later, the hands did that themselves.

The Heavenly Muse pointed a slender finger, a path of shining stars spiraling out from its tip. Scythas traced them with his eyes, following them to their destination-

“I can’t.”

“You must.”