1.36

The Young Griffon

What is the nature of tribulation?

Back when I had leapt from the top of the eastern mountain range with Sol at my side, in the throes of my ascension to the Sophic Realm, I had experienced a moment of perfect weightlessness, freedom in the truest sense. And then, when reality had asserted itself – as it always did – my stomach had risen up into my throat, a giddy and exhilarating sensation in its own way. It was enough to put a smile on my face whenever I thought back on it.

When Socrates threw me at the sun, my breath was slammed out of me as if the sky itself had punched me in the gut. I spun madly, without control, the world little more than a revolving blur of mountain and city and skies above. Then, I reached the storm and plunged into the wrathful crown of the Raging Heaven Cult.

At once, I was drenched from head to toe. The clouds were shockingly cold and alive with dancing threads of lightning, spreading like grasping hands through the moisture in the air. I struggled to right myself, twisting and throwing out my arms. I had just begun to regain control when I saw the face of the mountain rushing forward to greet me.

[Dawn shines forth with rosy fingers.]

Twenty arms of pankration intent struck out, some grasping me and others reaching out for the mountain’s jutting ridges. The same way that I had helped my younger cousins learn how to flip and contort their bodies in the air as children, by tossing them up and guiding them back down with steady hands, my pankration intent did the same for me. I flipped myself, bleeding off as much momentum as I could by bouncing back-and-forth between the hands of my own intent, and then I hit the mountain, tucking my shoulders and rolling until everything came to a stop.

Panting harshly and nearly vibrating with adrenaline, I rose up into a crouch and assessed my situation.

I was somewhere inside of the immortal storm that hung around the peak of Kaukoso Mons, that much was obvious. How far up I was, how close to the hidden peak, I had no idea. But I was far enough up that I noticed the effort when I inhaled. It wasn’t just that the air was frigidly cold. It was also thin, more so than it had ever been at the top of the eastern mountain range back home. The mountain itself didn’t seem to be much different up here, but immersed in the clouds as I was, I could only see a few feet in front of my face. Even with the light of dawn in my twenty-two palms. The only way I could truly gauge distance was by watching the-

Lightning struck beside me, close enough to electrify the fine hairs on my arms and make my teeth buzz in my mouth. I rolled sideways, watching another searing lance strike the stone where I had just been.

I tried to curse the old philosopher that had thrown me up here, but instead coughed up a mouthful of blood.

I rolled away from another thread of lightning, hacking blood as I went.

Well. This seemed appropriate.

As it turned out, the storm was aptly named.

“Whimpering Heaven,” I growled regardless, the taste of my own blood thick on my tongue. The stone was slick this far up the mountain, treacherous. What paths that existed were even more so.

I leaned sharply back, lightning arcing past my face and striking an outcrop of stone. As it passed, though, thin trailing fingers split off and grasped the tip of my nose. My teeth slammed together, muscles locking up as the lightning coursed through me. I exhaled a seething breath, and just barely managed to wrench back control of myself from the storm.

But there were paths. And that suggested something that I had suspected, but never known for certain. I raced down the path as fast as I dared to, crouching low as I went. I had tried jumping only once. It had nearly killed me, just like that. The skies weren’t safe. Not even for a moment.

Heaven was my enemy.

But returning to the paths. It was simply the case that the mystery cults of the free Mediterranean hoarded their confounding questions at all costs. The mystery of a cult was its founding myth, the thesis statement upon which the entire institution was built. These treasures were hoarded from the public, from outsiders, and even from the cult’s own initiates outside of significant occasions. It was not within the power of a Rosy Dawn mystiko to gaze upon the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god whenever the urge struck them.

It was simple enough to guard that corpse, of course. After all, it was buried in the heart of a vast mountain range. But not all cults were as the Rosy dawn. Not all mysteries were buried beneath spans and spans of ancient rock.

How did one guard a mystery with no natural barriers? How did one obscure from view something in plain sight? Out in the open air? Every cult had its own initiation rites, governed by a unique set of rules and regulations. But the purpose of those rites was always the same.

Of course, I could have been wrong. The Raging Heaven’s mystery could have been buried somewhere deep within the mountain. It could have been somewhere else entirely, separate from Kaukoso Mons. Or, perhaps, the Raging Heaven was as unique in this regard as it was in every other. Perhaps there was no mystery at all.

But as I watched another bolt of lightning arc down from wrathful Heaven and abruptly diverge, striking the upraised hand of a cowering stone giant, I began to doubt.

I slid down slick stone until I was crouched beneath the cowering giant. Light flashed – once, twice, three and then four times. The storm hammered relentlessly down on the statue of a long dead monster, and I felt the fury behind it.

I stayed there for a long while, staring up as Heaven came down, safe from the storm only because I was crouched in the shadow of something that it hated far more than me.

“Porphyrion,” I murmured to the monument of the twice-disgraced Giant. “Look at you. Greatest of the great striders, king of those that shake the earth. Isn’t that what they called you? How can you bear to see your likeness chiseled by such a disrespectful hand? Why can’t I hear your soul howling in outrage all the way from bleak Tartarus? They made you look like a coward.”

Heaven screamed and struck the destitute king of Giants, over and over again.

I looked down the mountain. I still couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I had no way of knowing how far I was from the storm’s edge. I had no way of knowing what Socrates was doing to my brother, now that I wasn’t there to stand beside him. The Fates and Muses knew that our Heroic companions would not stand there in my place.

I looked back up at poor Porphyrion. While he cowered and held a helpless hand up against heaven, his other hand hung worthless beside him. In that hand, insult of insults, the statue’s maker had placed a sword. Never to be properly wielded. Never to be brought to bear. Forever held back in hesitation and fear while its wielder flinched beneath the storm.

No. Not forever.

Pankration hands gripped the Giant’s clenched fist, flaring with the rosy light of dawn and prying apart his fingers. Ancient stone cracked and shattered, and a sword longer than I was tall fell into my waiting arms. I heaved it up onto one shoulder. Its edge was far too dull to cut me.

“Let’s see what Heaven has to say when the damned strike it back,” I said fiercely, and charged out from under the Giant’s silhouette.

I felt the lightning come, a vibration in the air that I could taste on my tongue. I dug my heels in and stopped as abruptly as I had started, pivoted, and slammed the Giant’s blade into the mountain.

I let go and watched the lightning veer sideways at the last moment and strike the pommel of the giant’s sword, rather than me. I waited a second longer than I knew, instinctively, that I needed to, and then I heaved it out of the stone.

“Is that all?” I taunted the fates, pounding pankration fists against the ground as I stood tall.

There came a low, rolling growl, like the thunder that preceded lightning. I turned my head, and beheld a hound of pure, shocking light prowling up the path towards me.

“Heel,” I commanded the storm hound. It barked in response, the sound like a thunderclap.

I turned and sprinted back up the mountain.

Time passed. I knew, because my rosy palms grew progressively dimmer as the morning turned to afternoon. Or perhaps that was my own internal sundial sabotaging me. Certainly, there was no way to tell by sight alone. The storm was thick, oppressive, and utterly unrelenting.

I found more hounds.

The distinction between a virtuous beast and a typical animal was similar to the difference between a cultivator and a mortal man, but not quite the same. Beasts could not cultivate in the same manner as thinking men, and so what they did was not entirely equitable. But it was close enough. Once semantics were stripped away, it became a question of magnitude for both man and monster.

That was the common consensus. That was what my mentors had taught me. But Sol had claimed that his demon dogs had cultivated in the style of men. And though I had dismissed him out of hand at first, I couldn’t so readily deny what was now before my eyes.

Hounds could grasp at primitive virtue, given the time, the opportunity, and the primordial strength of will. But no dog could grasp lightning in its teeth. No hound could cast off its flesh and blood and exchange them for the storm.

Tribulation hounds stalked me up the mountain, and with the appearance of each one, I was forced to question what I had always known to be the truth.

I planted the Giant king’s blade in the mountain and rolled sideways. A thunderclap bark was the only warning I got before the hound lunged. Light flashed and the giant’s blade rang like a bell, followed by a yelp that sizzled in the air.

They moved more like the lightning they were composed of than the dogs they had taken the form of. They crouched, and they prowled, that was true enough. They went through the motions of snapping their jaws and lunging like hunters. But the motion that was meant to bridge the gap between crouching and sinking their crackling teeth into prey happened faster than the eye could track. One moment there, the next, gone.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author’s preferred platform and support their work!

I had been clipped by lightning three times before the first hound had found me. I hadn’t allowed anything to touch me since. I knew in my virtuous heart that the fourth strike would be justice rendered. If one of these dogs got their teeth in me, I wouldn’t be getting them out.

I spotted another looming silhouette up ahead, and wrenched free the giant’s blade with hands of manifested pneuma while I rushed up to it.

I also found more of the condemned.

I lunged and rolled beneath another statue as Heaven struck down, my heart hammering a frenetic beat in my chest as the lightning slammed into the hunched shoulders of a struggling stone man.

“Isn’t it sad, Sisyphus?” I asked the degraded tyrant. He didn’t respond, preoccupied as he was heaving against the boulder that was his perpetual punishment. And also, perhaps, because he was made of stone.

I gripped the blade buried in his stone back and wrenched it free, passing it off to a pankration hand and adding it to my growing collection. Seven stolen blades, and one Giant’s broadsword, were my weapons against the storm. Periodically, as the lightning struck and I had no sorry victim to shelter in the shadow of, my pankration hands would offer their blades up to heaven and dispel the moment before they struck.

Dodging the blades after the lightning blew them out of the sky was a trial, but one I was well-suited to handle. It was far better than the alternative, at any rate.

“Take heart,” I told the statue of Sisyphus, clapping him on the shoulder and squinting up the mountain. “I think we’re nearly at the top.”

Thunderclaps sounded below as well as to my right. Upward it was.

Fatigue began to take its toll.

There were many things a cultivator could do without. Sleep, sustenance, even water in the most extreme circumstances. Citizens could put off these necessities for days at a time with the proper conditioning. Philosophers even longer, and Heroes longer than that, until at a certain point a mortal man could be born and die before a Tyrant was forced to break his fast.

But no cultivator could go without air. Even the best of us required a moment to breathe. And as much as it galled me to admit, I was approaching my limits. Skulking around and picking off Crows in the night was one thing. This was another entirely.

I fell more than I slid beneath my latest safe haven, slumping down onto one elbow, precariously close to touching the statue and sharing in its tribulation as lightning struck it over and over again. Twelve pankration hands drove their stolen blades into the stone around me in a circle. I heard barking thunderclaps in the distance. Still closer than I preferred.