1.24

The Young Griffon

One of the better indicators of a person‘s character was the way they treated their juniors. The hunger for standing was a natural element of every human soul, and the temptation to abuse that standing ever with us. Not always for its own sake, perhaps, but all too often opportunities presented themselves just out of reach, and all too often there were other people, subordinates or friends or even family, positioned just right to act as stepping stones so you could close that distance.

For many, it was a question that almost didn’t warrant asking. When it was nothing more than glory or fortune on the line, the temptation was strong enough. But for cultivators, those who coveted divinity’s distant star, existences that gained years of extended life for each small advancement? Well. For them, it wasn’t a question at all.

The path to heaven was only wide enough for one man to walk it at a time. My tutors had hammered that into me at an early age. In the end, we were all alone when we challenged the Fates. The only uncertainty was how many lesser men we stomped down on our way up.

Eventually, a cultivator placed all beneath them. It was only a matter of when. We called it the Tyrannic Realm for a reason, after all.

Still, there were those that understood this fact and accepted it as a necessary consequence of defying what the fates had planned for them – good and bad. And on the other hand, there were those that hid behind it like a shield, cringing away from all responsibility.

I was pleased to find that Elissa was the former of the two.

“What did I say? It isn’t a matter of force or finesse, it’s your grip,” the Heroine said sharply. The scars on her marble skin turned an otherwise stern frown into something truly vicious.

The boy she was lecturing, a tan youth that looked to be somewhere between Heron and Castor’s age, stood to like he had been struck, quickly shifting his grip to something that looked less comfortable for him, but better overall. His blade was a fine thing, simply crafted with impeccable materials. Flawless iron, and a wavering line of bronze traveling through its surface like a serpent, or a sun ray. Looking at it and the boy that held it, nervous and eager and hopeful, his Raging Heaven attire neatly folded and set aside in a way that spoke of his care for it, I got the impression that they were together a product of simple laborers and backwater settlements.

For him to have qualified for admittance to the Raging Heaven at his age, the indigo jewel of the Half-Step City, he must have been truly talented. His pneuma, firmly in the Sophic Realm, spoke to this as well. Still, even among prodigies, there were those who stood above.

While the boy and four others brandished naked iron, Elissa held only an olive tree’s branch and her loose grip. It was more than enough.

Desert-heat eyes scoured the boy’s form until, satisfied, she made a come-hither gesture with her free hand. All five took a different approach, some lunging low and others taking wide, sweeping strikes. Her olive tree branch whipped out with improbable speed, not only taking strikes from weapons that should have severed it with ease, but knocking them aside without care. She pivoted – pranced, really – moving through them with the grace of a dancer at a symposia.

Without looking, she whipped her branch around to meet the knife edge of my descending palm, scowling as the Rosy Fingers of Dawn lit her impromptu weapon on fire. Five young Philosophers of the Raging Heaven leapt back, alarmed and shouting.

“What do you want, Griffon?” Elissa asked irritably. I smiled and shrugged, pivoting on one foot and driving up with my other hand.

[The sun rises.]

I didn’t manifest any violent intent, and my attack wasn’t particularly quick. In an instant the Heroine figured out what I was doing and scoffed, but nonetheless twisted with a similarly languid motion and swept her burning branch at my hand, forcing the strike aside.

“This lowly sophist heard that a Heroine was dispensing wisdom to her juniors. What else could I do but seek some out for myself? For a newly minted Philosopher, such a fortuitous encounter might only come once in my life.” As I spoke, I led her through something that was as much a dance as it was a fight, a nameless game of choreographed violence that I had often played with Nikolas when I was younger.

“Newly minted Philosopher,” she repeated as we moved, almost offended in her skepticism. In response, I flexed my Pneuma. It was undeniably of the Sophic Realm, first rank.

Elissa didn’t believe it for a moment. But the boys did.

“Junior!”

“Without even asking!”

“The audacity!” The boy with the shoddy grip rushed me with his blade poised. He was older than the trio of boys I’d slapped around the day before, closer to his physical prime, and that made his superior cultivation far more dangerous.

A pankration hand yanked him back by the white cloth hanging around his waist. When he jerked around to strike at it another two hammered up between his legs. The boy choked and fell to the dirt.

“I’ve noticed a trend among the initiates of this cult,” I said conversationally, splaying ten more hands in a burning ring around us, warding off the other philosophers. They eyed me warily while their fellow gagged on the ground.

“I don’t care.” There had been a bare flicker of something fatally sharp in those desert heat eyes, an instant of protective rage. It was gone as quick as it came, when she realized I’d only given the boy something convincing to think about.

“Yes you do,” I said easily, continuing our dance without missing a step. It was a game as much as any of the others I’d played the last couple days, a lighthearted representation of a fatal encounter. We took lazy, almost sloppy swings at one another, but the strikes they represented were a murderous blur in my mind’s eye. This was not a game won by increments. The first to falter lost.

As her branch represented a blade, and my fists were only that, I was at a firm disadvantage. In theory. But I had been smacking down live steel since I was a boy. And this game was entirely a question of tactics.

Elissa’s swordplay was some of the best I’d ever seen, but it had been Nikolas Aetos that taught me this game.

“Tell me, then,” she demanded, focusing intently as the blade of my left hand met the tip of her branch and gently burnt it away.

I could almost see the image in her head, of ten thousand pankration hands slamming against her blade with ruinous heat, breaking it at its imperfect points. As far as she was concerned, we had both only been feeling one another out when we clashed at the funeral. She thought I had far more to give.

I glanced at the young men ringed around us. Outrage and jealousy abounded, and it was easy enough to see why. I hadn’t inserted myself into her impromptu lesson immediately, after all. In observing, I’d spent as much time taking the measure of her juniors in relation to her as I had of her relation to them.

It was fortunate enough for a cultivator in the Heroic Realm to give you a moment of their time. It was doubly fortunate when they were a beautiful woman and you were just discovering your body’s earthly desires. These five had sought her out on this jagged peak within spitting distance of the Storm That Never Ceased because she was by far the best swordsman that would give them the time of day.

“They’re all soft.”

But more than that, they’d come to bask in her attention.

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Five Sophic cultivators seethed at my disdain, their influence lashing out impotently at my pankration hands. Their egos broke against the Rosy Fingers of Dawn without resistance, closer to sea spray than any true wave.

“They’re young,” Elissa reproached me. Ho, there was real anger in that desert heat. How surprising.

“Children are young,” I dismissed, ducking a sharp jab at my eyes and thrusting a palm at her kidney. She twisted artfully, fuschia silk shifting across her sculpted skin. I snorted as five sets of eyes stared. “Cultivators are only ever unrefined.”

“It isn’t enough to say things that sound meaningful,” Elissa replied, striking. “It has to actually mean something, too.”

“How cruel.” Advance, feint, step back. “But you know, it isn’t enough to act like you’ve disproven something, either.” Above our heads, the undying storm rumbled. “You still have to prove me wrong.”

Elissa scowled and suddenly shifted the rhythm she’d kept thus far, adopting a new style. The transition was so smooth that I almost didn’t notice in time. I leaned away from the next three strikes, raising an eyebrow.

She caved. “Soft in what way, then?”

“I have a cousin,” I said, and the pankration hands surrounding us turned their palms inward. Two went rigid and flat like daggers, and were seized by two more in turn. They began to dance through the air in a series of sharp jabs, slashes, and cuts.

For all that he had harbored absurd shame over his lack of manifested virtue, the littlest kyrios had never allowed himself to wallow and shirk his martial pursuits. The five young Philosophers watched with reluctant fascination as I illustrated Myron’s dagger forms. One boy in particular, with delicate features and thin fingers, traced the motions with intense focus. He’d come here to learn the sword, ostensibly, but knives were clearly his true interest.

“You have a cousin,” Elissa repeated flatly.

“Several, actually. But the youngest is nine years old, and already his foundations are packed tighter than anything I’ve seen on this pretty mountain. Compared to these boys his cultivation may be lesser, but he is the better man. When discourse turns to dispute, he possesses the only thing that truly matters. The element that these boys lack.”

One of the two pankration suddenly twisted and threw its makeshift dagger-hand. It drove through the stone behind the sunray swordsman, just missing his head. He flinched sideways.

“An edge.”

Elissa said nothing.