1.23

The Son of Rome

“That went differently in your head, didn’t it,” I said, eyeing the ink-black pile of bones and bile that Sorea had vomited into my open palm. They were warm, warmer than they should have been. Scorching hot, even by a cultivator’s standards.

“You just ate it,” Griffon said, addressing my bird with incredulous disgust. “How did you digest the second one that fast?”

My eyes rolled. “It isn’t a real crow. We have no idea what its flesh is even made of.”

“Pneuma, obviously.” He stalked over to the corpse of the assassin he’d impaled on the stone sentinel’s trident. He didn’t hesitate to desecrate it, jostling the dead man from the restful position I’d settled him in and twisting his head to and fro. He gripped his jaw and looked into his slack mouth, then the narrow passages of his nostrils and ears.

It occurred to me that this may have been the first life the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn had ever taken.

“There wasn’t another crow in his robe?” he asked. At my negative response, he slammed a palm to the hollowed stone beside the corpse’s face and pushed himself to his feet. He turned to pace across the tiles.

“What is a Crow without his wings?” Griffon murmured, nearly to himself, frowning ferociously. He spat. “No one.”

“They may have only sent one for the pair of them,” I offered. Scarlet eyes turned balefully my way. “

“Tell me then, master. How many Crows did you come across without their wings on the night of the kyrios’ funeral?”

I frowned, considering the pile of scalding hot cartilage in my palm. My memories were largely a blur, but the cadence was always clear. The steady rhythm of the legions marched a vivid path through otherwise muddled memories. I followed that path, soundlessly mouthing the words, and in those crystalline moments I remembered the Crows.

I remembered the way they’d crumpled. The way they’d skulked, the way they’d scattered, the way they’d screamed. Never in my life had I come close to the alabaster heights of what the Greeks called the Heroic Realm – but then, it hadn’t mattered much that night. I’d led weaker men against greater enemies than them. With Anastasia, Scythas, and Jason at my side, they hadn’t stood a chance.

I remembered how they’d fallen. And I remembered the sounds of beating wings in the shadows as they fled.

“Sorea,” I said. The messenger eagle flexed its great talons around my forearm, just enough to acknowledge me. “Did you notice another?” Virtuous beast or not, it was still only a bird. Yet the look Sorea gave me in response to that question was utterly unmistakeable. “That’s a no.”

“Bastard must have sent it off when I arrived.” Griffon reclaimed his stolen rags and ran flaming hands up and down them, grimacing at the trio of gaping trident holes in the cloth. “Sol, trade me.”

“Not a chance,” I said without hesitation, dumping the ink-black crow bones on the lip of the olive oil pool and brushing Sorea off my arm. He edged towards the bones, beak snapping softly. “Leave them.” The bird shrieked indignantly but obeyed, taking flight out of the temple and vanishing into the night.

I wrung out the robes of a dead man, watching what moisture remained fall into the pool, drop by drop. I contemplated Griffon’s reflection, the darkness of his expression as he turned his set of midnight attire over in his hands.

“You’ve never killed a man before,” I said without judgement. For a moment, his eyes flickered.

“Wrong.”

Lies built upon truth. “You’ve never killed a man before today,” I clarified. His silence spoke for him. “It shakes you. I know.” Frozen moments, memories of all the men I’d stood shoulder to shoulder with when they took their first life. All the men I’d commanded to bloody their unsullied hands.

In the pursuit of a higher ideal, the men of Rome could bear that burden without regret. With the hand of Gaius guiding them, legionnaires struck down the enemies of the Republic without fear of the heavens above. But even so, and even then, that blood could drown you as surely as the sea. Salt and ash.

I considered the reflection of my only true companion in this barbarous world, and wondered how many dead men it would take to drown him.

“It isn’t weakness to regret-”

“I don’t.”

My hands clenched around the twist of black cloth, wringing a trickle of olive oil from it that struck the pool and distorted his reflection with ripples. I looked at him. His face matched his words. There was no regret in the set of his jaw, no grief in those narrowed eyes. Stripped of his usual good humor, what remained was the same foundation that had always been there. What I’d recognized the day I met him.

“From the moment I was born, I’ve known the worth of my soul.” The words were matter-of-fact. Without doubt. “My life is mine. If someone tries to take it, I won’t hesitate to take theirs first. I have nothing to regret.”

I didn’t argue. I knew the truth when I saw it.

“Mad Greek,” I said ruefully. He smirked faintly and belted the mangled black robe around his waist, obscuring his Rosy Dawn attire and golden tunic turned makeshift satchel.

“You still want to do this?” I knew the answer already. I shrugged the dead man’s disguise over my indigo robes. What had been a voluminous fit on the would-be assassin was just tight enough that I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable fighting in it, so I didn’t bother wearing it as it was intended. As a cloak, it would do.

The seemingly mundane material blurred at the edges of my perceptions, fading into the shadows around us like a lash of paint across canvas. Growing thinner and blending together. Like I was a piece of this place as much as anything else. As I wrapped the layers around my body, I felt my own sense of self, the sensation of my own vital breath’s circulation, fading into anonymity.

It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was closer to those iron manacles that it should have been.

Stolen story; please report.

“Of course,” Griffon said, pulling me from my thoughts. He had the crow’s hood over his head now, obscuring his most striking features. He’d even done something to his hair while I wasn’t looking, preventing it from spilling down to his shoulders in its usual way. “You noticed it too, didn’t you?”

“The cloth conceals,” I said, and as the sheer black hood fell over my face, thin enough to see through without issue, my voice changed as well. Not enough to belong to someone else. Just enough to not belong to me.

“What is a mask if not a tool of anonymity?” Griffin mused, leaning over the rim of the pool to consider himself.

I noticed a somewhat glaring flaw in his disguise.

“Worthless, when you’re still half naked.” Oddly enough, it was more pleasing than unsettling to hear a stranger’s voice render judgment on his stupidity in place of my own. For a moment, it was as if I wasn’t the only sane person left in this world.

Griffin shrugged, unconcerned. “You wouldn’t trade me, and I refuse to wear a tunic riddled with holes.”

“Anyone from the funeral will recognize you immediately.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said lightly, gathering up crow bones in his cupped palms and dipping them into the pool. A stranger’s pneuma, utterly divorced from Griffon’s and yet his nonetheless, permeated through the pool and the bones in particular, wearing away at them the same way he had worn away a chunk of marble an eternity ago at the Rosy Dawn’s initiation trials.

Ink-black flecks of bone whirled and dispersed in the olive oil, turning the pool black. Forming storm clouds beneath the chryselephantine king’s feet. Pankration hands that felt like nothing I had ever encountered before but could be nothing other than Griffon’s own violent intent dipped into the pool one by one, cupping ink-black olive oil in ethereal palms.