1.22

The Young Griffon

It had to be said. For all of my accolades and for all of my majesty, for all that I was the only man that could ever be me, I was not perfect. I had my failings. And even more egregious than that, I was not all-knowing. In some respects, I was not even particularly well-informed.

My father had always done things in his own time, and the Scarlet City had regulated its pace to match his. For all that I was myself, I was no different in that regard. I cultivated the virtue that he forced upon me, I excelled in the tasks that he set before me, and I learned the lessons that he saw fit to teach me. And only those lessons.

I sought out what I could, whenever I could, of course. But if Damon Aetos didn’t want you to know something, there wasn’t a single soul in Alikos who would dare to speak of it. If there was something he didn’t want you to have, all the gold in Egypt couldn’t convince an Alikoan to sell it to you.

I’d always known that my father was keeping things from me. But I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of it until I’d stepped foot into the sanctuary city.

The Crows were each of the Sophic Realm, which meant that whichever faction sent them hadn’t been pointed our way by our new friends. Otherwise, they would have sent Heroes. In the kyrios’ absence, the Raging Heaven had abandoned all but the most surface level pretenses of unity. The various factions of the free Mediterranean had only just begun to pick each other apart trying to fill the chasm left behind, and division was the name of the game.

Sol and I had implicated ourselves by associating with not one, but six Heroic cultivators in full view of various indigo initiates. This had been inevitable.

Tirelessly, the Crow on the left promised in the voice of his soul.

Forever at hand, the Crow on the right declared with unwavering resolve.

I saw the confusion in Sol’s eyes, soon overtaken by the storm. Gravitas rocked the temple, an inaudible boom that made my teeth vibrate and pounded the Crow on the right back into the olive oil pool. Sol lunged forward to trade blows with the Crow on the left, but the cultivator in black deftly avoided him, ducking and pivoting on one foot and laying a vicious kick into his right shin.

It didn’t sweep Sol’s legs out from under him like the Crow had intended, but the Roman grunted and staggered sideways, pointing a damning finger at the scavenger. Torchlight shadow flickered around him and he blurred left, faster than any Sophic cultivator could possibly move.

He avoided the invocation of Sol’s virtue and caught my clenched fist with his gut. I savored the sweet sound of a man choking on air, hammering into him from every angle with pankration hands wreathed in the rosy light of dawn.

[The dawn breaks.]

Without pause, spoke the Crow, slamming his forehead into mine. Starlight exploded in my eyes and my ears rang, the force of the blow unlike anything I had experienced from a Philosopher before. I bared my teeth in a grin and caught his hands as they lashed up.

A thin line of blood trickled down from the point where his hooded forehead met mine, as the sounds of splashing and savage struggle sounded from the olive oil pool that served as the foundation for the chryselephantine throne. The Crow had no heart flames to illuminate his eyes behind his hood, but I stared deeply into them anyway.

“So this is a man of principle,” I mused, gripping his hood and the tattered edges of his midnight robes with the hands of my intent, ripping and tearing. His pneuma flared.

And he spoke. “Sacrilege,” the Crow intoned, “to fight in the temple of the Father.” And just as before, when those young Philosophers had stated their facts, the strength of his soul re-doubled.

I abandoned the effort of unmasking him as the pressure on our joined hands became unbearable. Pankration hands chopped viciously down on his forearms, forcing him to release me. I leapt back across the tiles.

Three boys, and now this. Not a coincidence – this was something fundamental. Something I should know.

“Starting a fight is far worse than ending it,” I replied, putting the weight of my pneuma behind it. I felt a hint of something, some weightlessness, but I was only imitating what I’d observed as an outsider. I concentrated, while Sol jumped straight up to the ceiling in a spray of olive oil, the Crow on the right in close pursuit.

My opponent turned to flickering shadows again, but he’d already shown me the trick of it the first time. He braced himself first, taking the stance that he would emerge from the technique in. Chambering a right hook from fifty feet away.

I leaned right, dodging it by a hair, and drove a knee up between his legs. As I did it, I condemned him.

“Ambushing your cult’s own honored guests,” I denounced him, striking him twice in the kidney and five times across the face. “On your city’s own holy ground!” The Crow lurched back, shadows flickering as he attempted to escape me. I grabbed him with flaming hands and reeled him back in. “Among heaven and earth, you alone are the dishonored one!”

And I felt it. A power that stirred above my eyes, pulsing through my skull and coursing down, down, ripping through me like an entire jug of kykeon and filling me with vital strength.

The Crow stomped my bare foot and lowered his shoulder into my chest, charging. Lightning threads of pain shot through my foot, and my cultivation faltered as he knocked the wind out of me. He was my superior in cultivation, but that had been the case before with the children. But this cultivator was a grown man – his body had weathered years of intense conditioning. The strength of his body matched that of his soul.

And then, the strength of his reason superseded mine as he lifted my feet from the floor and snarled.

“Fool. I am no one.”

The inexplicable head rush left me as quickly as it had come, an ice bath that shocked the senses and stole the strength from my limbs. It almost killed me as the Crow took us to the ground, producing a hideous rusted dagger from a fold in his robes and stabbing it at my side. But even while my mind wavered, my intent remained true. Pankration hands caught the blade and knocked it from his hand, even as its rusted edge cut into my soul.

I spat blood onto his black veil and swung my legs up, hooking them around his chest and twisting at the waist while we fell to the tiles. The assassin’s blade clattered to the hallowed marble floor, the sound of it all wrong as it skittered and spun across the tiles. The Crow lurched for it, kicking viciously at me, but it was too late. I had him.

The Crow on the right flared his influence, crying out in that soundless voice, and Sol responded in kind with a tidal wave of gravity that caught everyone within the temple. Myself included. My stomach flipped and my heart flew up into my throat as the entire world shifted onto a different axis, and I flew sideways as if I was falling out of the sky. Somewhere up above, Sorea shrieked and the Crow cried out in his real voice.

A marble sentinel stood in the shadow of an archway, kneeling in deference as it faced the father. There were eleven others in the temple, each carrying a weapon and all of them without a face. This one had a trident in hand, brandished invitingly as we approached it. The Crow thrashed against my hold as our bodies lifted off the ground entirely, hammering into me with clenched fists and vile shadow techniques that burnt away at the touch of the rosy fingers.

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I planted an open palm flat against the Crow’s hooded face and shoved it sideways, twisting him around with the leverage of my leg lock as I did. The statued sentinel may have been nothing more than stone, but its trident was purest bronze. I slammed the Crow into it, and all three points of the trident erupted out of his chest.

I pulled myself to the ground with pankration hands and turned, catching the second Crow as Sol’s attack sent him flying my way. He immediately went wild, fighting me like a rat caught by its tail. Which, in the end, wasn’t far from the truth.

“You’re no one, are you?” I grunted, planting my feet and ignoring his impotent elbows and kicks as I heaved him over my shoulder. The head rush returned, blooming inside my skull and coursing through my limbs as I invoked what could only be the primary weapon of every warrior scholar.

“As if I could ever lose to such a coward. My tribulation has a face.”

Their rhetoric.

I slammed the Crow to the floor and stepped back as Sol plummeted from the tip of the Father’s ivory spear and stomped the poor bastard through the scarlet tiles. An invocation of Gravitas at the moment of impact caved the scavenger’s chest in entirely. The sound of it was horrific. The noise the man made as he arched up was even more so. I caught his face with pankration hands and drove it back down, smothering him until he went limp.

The Philosopher died and his last, gagging breath exploded through the temple. One last gasp, raging through the temple of the Father and extinguishing every torch in sight.

Ensconced in sudden darkness, the true crow nearly got away.

Sorea swept down with a triumphant cry and sank its talons into an avian mass of liquid shadow as it attempted to flee. Just as before, the manifestation of anonymity wailed horribly as it was consumed by the Roman messenger eagle bit by bit.

“What was that?” Sol asked gutturally. His indigo attire, pristine just a few moments ago, was now drenched in olive oil and torn at his stomach and his right thigh where the crow had cut him. Poisoned again, no doubt, though he was breathing steadily for now.

“Hard to tell,” I said sarcastically, swiping blood from my bare chest. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it was my point being proven.”

Sol scowled, running a hand through oil-slick black hair. “Not that. What were they saying? And how were they saying it?”

“Ho, the great Legate doesn’t know? I was going to ask you, master,” I said mockingly. A wave of his influence hit me, the riptide pull urging me off balance. I set my stance and braced with pneuma hands, spitting blood at his feet in response.

“Just tell me,” he snapped. “I’m sick and tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

“That makes two of us.” In the dark, with little but the wet sounds of a virtuous beast gorging itself and a Sophic cultivator struggling to force breath through punctured lungs, Sol and I took the measure of one another.